332. Challenges and Opportunities

Faculty and administrators have been faced with new challenges and opportunities as higher education adapts to a rapidly changing environment. In this episode, SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. joins us to discuss strategies that colleges and universities can adopt to navigate a successful path forward.

After graduating from Harvard, Dr. King acquired a Master’s degree from Teacher’s College, Columbia University, and taught high school social studies. He later co-founded Roxbury Preparatory Charter School and served as a co-Director for five years. Under his leadership, students in this school attained the highest scores of any urban middle school in the state and closed the racial achievement gap. After acquiring his doctoral degree from Columbia and a law degree from Yale, he served as New York State’s Education Commissioner from 2011 to 2014. Dr. King left NY for a while to work in the Obama administration as Deputy Secretary of Education from 2015 to 2016 and joined Obama’s Cabinet as Secretary of Education from 2015 to 2016. Following his work in the Obama Administration, Dr. King continued to advocate for increased educational equity and access as President and CEO of the Education Trust.

Transcript

John: Faculty and administrators have been faced with new challenges and opportunities as higher education adapts to a rapidly changing environment. In this episode, we discuss strategies that colleges and universities can adopt to navigate a successful path forward.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is the State University of New York Chancellor John B. King Jr. He has a long history of involvement with education. After graduating from Harvard, Dr. King acquired a Master’s degree from Teacher’s College, Columbia University, and taught high school social studies. He later co-founded Roxbury Preparatory Charter School and served as a co-Director for five years. Under his leadership, students in this school attained the highest scores of any urban middle school in the state and closed the racial achievement gap. After acquiring his doctoral degree from Columbia and a law degree from Yale, he served as New York State’s Education Commissioner from 2011 to 2014. Dr. King left NY for a while to work in the Obama administration as Deputy Secretary of Education from 2015 to 2016 and joined Obama’s Cabinet as Secretary of Education from 2015 to 2016. Following his work in the Obama Administration, Dr. King continued to advocate for increased educational equity and access as President and CEO of the Education Trust. Welcome, Chancellor King.

Chancellor King: Thanks so much, excited to talk with you all.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: Chancellor King, are you drinking any tea with us today?

Chancellor King: I am, sweet ginger citrus tea. And this is part of my New Year’s resolution. I’ve always been a tea drinker, but I also am a longtime coffee drinker. [LAUGHTER] But a New Year’s resolution this year was to put the coffee aside and switch only to herbal no-caffeine tea. So that’s what I’m working on.

Rebecca: Well, I’m glad that you decided to record this podcast then as part of your New Year’s resolution.[LAUGHTER]

Chancellor King: It fits in perfectly. [LAUGHTER]

John: And following that theme. I am drinking a spearmint and peppermint blend tea, as another herbal tea.

Rebecca: I may have noted that I was trying to cut down on caffeine in an earlier podcast, but I happen to have a Scottish afternoon tea today. [LAUGHTER]

Chancellor King: No…

John: Which is a bit more caffeine than breakfast teas.

Rebecca: Yeah, my accountability isn’t working well. [LAUGHTER]

John: There’s so many things we’d like to discuss with you. But given the time limitations of the podcast, we’d like to focus on your views of the challenges and opportunities facing higher education today. What do you see as the major opportunities in higher ed today?

Chancellor King: I think higher ed is foundational to the long-term success of both our economy and our democracy. We have vital roles to play in both. Certainly, we have tremendous opportunities in the state to prepare students for success in the semiconductor industry which is rapidly growing in the state, for success in healthcare where we have tremendous needs, success in green jobs, and some of the resilience work that we’re going to need to do as a society because of climate change, tremendous opportunity to prepare students for every conceivable profession, from teachers to writers to actors to artists. And, we have a crucial role to play in the health of our democracy. We’ve got to make sure that we are preparing all of our students with a rich liberal arts education so that they can be critical thinkers, so they can be critical consumers of modern media, so that they can be discerning, so that they can make decisions as voters, as neighbors, as citizens. And we’ve got to make sure that our institutions are able to meet both of those missions across degree programs.

Rebecca: What are some of the ways that we can move forward on some of those opportunities?

Chancellor King: Well, look, we were very fortunate that last year, Governor Hochul and the legislature made such a significant investment in SUNY, $163 million, the largest operating aid increase SUNY has received in 20 plus years. It allowed us to make double digit percentage increases in state support at all of our state operated campuses as well as to invest funds in mental health services, services for students with disabilities, internships, which is critical to preparing students for those transitions to career. We were able to put $10 million towards the expansion of research, which is another critical role of the higher ed sector in the health of our society. And we’re able to dedicate consistent funds for supporting our food pantries across our institutions, because we worry about our students are struggling with food insecurity. So one way we move forward is through continuing to invest in the strength of our institutions. Another important way that we can move forward on that agenda is continuing to adapt our offerings, our programs, creating new paths for students, very excited about the Governor’s announcement around AI and the creation of Empire AI and what will be a significant investment in SUNY’s ability to prepare students for research and careers and ethical use of AI, very excited about the new Stony Brook Climate Resilience Campus, $700 million campus that will be built on Governors Island, just off the coast of Manhattan. So we’ve got to continue to evolve as we respond to the opportunities and challenges for our economy and for our democracy.

John: Speaking of challenges, what do you see as the major challenges facing higher ed today?

Chancellor King: There are, unfortunately, a number of major challenges. Many of our institutions, certainly at SUNY, but private institutions in the state, higher ed institutions across the country, have seen significant declines in enrollment. And that was all exacerbated by COVID. That said, I’m a glass half full, tea cup half full, kind of guy. [LAUGHTER] And I look at that and I say, part of what we need to do is evolve our thinking about who our students are. We’ve got to make sure that we’re reaching out to every New Yorker to let them know there’s a place at SUNY. We’ve got to do more work to make sure that we are recruiting low-income students, first-gen students, Black and Latino students, indigenous students, immigrant students, that more of our veterans know that they can come back after their service and find opportunity on our campuses, that folks who are involved in AmeriCorps service programs know that there’s a place for them at SUNY, that our working adults know that they can come back to SUNY, whether it’s one of our community colleges or one of our four-year institutions, to complete a degree that maybe they started and didn’t finish. We’ve got 2 million New Yorkers with some credits, no degree, or maybe that they’re coming to a campus for a microcredential or a certificate, but we’re gonna then help them leverage that into a degree program over time. So there’s the challenge of declining enrollment, but there’s also the opportunity. We are already seeing progress at SUNY, this is the first year in 10 years that we had an enrollment increase across all sectors. But another major challenge is the attacks that we’re seeing on academic freedom, on teaching the truth about our history, the attacks trying to undermine our ability to talk about the hard parts of our history, the times we fallen short of the promise of American democracy, slavery, the horrific treatment of Native Americans in the way land was taken from them. That’s a part of our history. It’s just the truth, and we’ve got to grapple with those hard truths. But there are folks all over the country, unfortunately, who are trying to prevent discussion of those topics, even states where they’re saying they don’t want any higher end institution to mention the word diversity or the word equity. So that I think is very dangerous, and very proud that in New York, we are standing up for those values. We’re gonna be the opposite of Florida, and we’re gonna stand up for diversity, equity, and inclusion, but I worry a lot about that attack.

John: One of the concerns that many people have are these attacks on higher ed, that are convincing more parents and many students that college is no longer needed. Because, for political reasons, perhaps, a lot of people are arguing that a college degree is no longer useful. What can we do to help push back against some of those attacks that we’re seeing nationwide?

Chancellor King: Yeah, you know, there are a few things. And certainly, we have to make the value proposition clear. It’s important that students understand and families understand that over your lifetime, if you have a bachelor’s degree, it will translate into a million dollars more of earnings. So there is this very clear value proposition. We’ve got to take on the affordability question, which a lot of families worry about. You hear so much about the student debt crisis. So we’ve got to really help folks understand how affordable SUNY is. 53% of our students across our institutions go tuition free because of the Pell program and the New York state tuition assistance program as well as the Excelsior program. And our tuition, as you know, just over $7,000, is significantly less than many of our peer institutions in neighboring states. It really is possible to get an incredibly high quality education affordably at SUNY, and we have to make sure that parents and students understand that. We’ve also got to, I think, go back to first principles around what is the purpose and the vision of higher education. The fact of the matter is, you look at almost every indicator, life expectancy, health outcomes, you name it, they’re better for folks who have higher education. And what we’re aspiring to, is to say come to our institutions for an education that will help you lead a healthier, more fulfilling life. I want you to come to our institution and maybe take art history, and so your life is enriched because when you travel, when you go to a new city, you go to a museum and you discover insights around art that you otherwise wouldn’t have had. That’s the part of the beauty of higher education. So we’ve got to make the value proposition argument, the dollars and cents argument, but I don’t want us to forget about also making the richness quality of education argument as well.

Rebecca: As we think about broader access, and our student bodies becoming increasingly diverse in a variety of ways, we do see a number of historically minoritized students having lower retention and DFW rates. What can educational institutions do to reduce some of these equity gaps in degree attainment and not just starting?

Chancellor King: So important, and at the Education Trust, this was really a major area of focus for us, trying to make the case that institutions have a responsibility to not only recruit first-year students, but to provide the supports necessary for students to complete and go on to success after graduation. One of the things we’re working on at SUNY, as I think you know, because Oswego’s very much part of this, we are replicating across 25 of our campuses a program called ASAP for community colleges or ACE for our four-year institutions. And the idea behind ASAP and ACE which has been shown to be successful in doubling completion rates in randomized controlled trials, so it has a tremendous evidence base. The core strategy around ASAP and ACE is to provide supports that make it more possible for students to be successful: more intensive advising, cohort experience, help with just-in-,time financial assistance for the student who, the car breaks down and so then they can’t get to their job, they can’t get to class and for want of $250 for the auto mechanic, they end up dropping out of school. ASAP and ACE have shown that if you provide that just-in-time financial support, it can make all the difference. There’s also an effort to support transportation, so that you try to take that out of the way as an obstacle for students. And I’m very hopeful about the impact that ASAP and ACE can have across our 25 campuses. But, more broadly, there’s really a cultural commitment we have to make as a community of institutions, that we are going to be laser focused on helping our students complete with a meaningful degree or credential. And so when we see those high DFW rates in a class, we’ve got to ask, “Well, is there more we could do in terms of academic intervention? Is there more support that we can provide? Are we seeing patterns for students with disabilities where they’re not getting the accommodations they need? Are there opportunities to maybe have those classes structured differently, so that students are able to get some of the foundational support they need at the same time as they are tackling new rigorous challenges, what sometimes people will refer to as co-requisite classes that integrate the remedial work with actual credit-earning college-level work.” So we’ve got to just be disciplined about this. And we’ve got to invest in the programs that we know will make a difference. EOP has been fabulously successful in New York for decades. Again, a set of wraparound supports, a sense of community for students, and importantly, financial assistance.

John: Are there any specific types of interventions in the classroom that seem to be particularly effective in terms of reducing some of the equity gaps by race, by first-gen status, and by Pell eligibility.

Chancellor King: It certainly varies by discipline, but a couple observations, one is relationship building is critically important. Students need to know that you care, and they need to know that they can come for help. When I was teaching at University of Maryland College Park before I came to SUNY, one of the things I would do every year on my syllabus, I would include basically a basic needs statement to say, here’s where you can go on campus if you are struggling with food insecurity, or housing insecurity, or if you need additional academic support, or you need additional mental health support. And here’s my contact information and my TAs contact information, and I want you to reach out if you need help in these areas outside of our class. Of course reach out if you need help with the work in our class, but if you need help in these other areas, please let us know. And just that step of communicating to students, here’s where the resources are and I want you to reach out for help, can be quite powerful. So relationships are critical. A second one I would point out is, again, it varies by discipline, but opportunities for students to do projects, hands-on learning, we’ve seen oftentimes that when classes are only lectures and exams, that students may not get as engaged. And it may not be as accessible to students as it could be. It takes more time. It’s more complicated to design courses that build in project-based or experiential learning. But we certainly need to be thoughtful about that, as we design courses.

Rebecca: I love the examples that you’re sharing because they really underscore that sense of belonging a student might gain and really feel seen, acknowledging that, you know, students may be housing insecure means you belong here, we know that you might be housing insecure.

Chancellor King: That’s right. That’s exactly right.

John: One of the things that’s had a pretty profound impact on higher ed, or at least it’s raised a lot of questions in higher ed, is the rapid development of AI tools ever since the introduction of ChatGPT last year. And we’re seeing new tools coming out almost every week or modifications on the existing tools. How do you see this affecting how we teach students and how students learn? And how can we prepare students better for a world in which they’ll be working with AI tools that’ll be increasingly better developed.

Chancellor King: It’s a fascinating set of questions. And this, I think, is going to be an important area of discussion for faculties across all of our SUNY institutions for many years to come. I’m very excited that the governor committed to the Empire AI initiative, because that will invest real resources in our institutions to do some of the research to unlock the potential power of AI to advance the public good. You think about some of the opportunities where AI could help with medical diagnosis and the development of treatment plans in medicine… early days, but we see some opportunities there. We’ve got an NSF grant at UB, University at Buffalo, to focus on the use of AI as a tool for improving instruction for students with disabilities, and there’s tremendous potential there. We know that AI can be leveraged for advances in manufacturing and robotics, so tremendous opportunities to leverage AI. There are also tremendous risks. We have a set of scholars at UB as well, who are working on the issue of deep fakes, and the risks that deep fakes pose to our democracy and the good functioning of our society. We have a faculty member at UAlbany, who is a philosophy professor whose focus through the early part of his career was on trust between people, and now he is writing about and studying trust between people and machines, as we think about how AI is reshaping elements of our society. So lots of opportunity here for us on the research side, and also some very real implications for thinking about teaching and learning. Some hopeful things like how can AI be used to power personalized tutoring for students who may be struggling? How can AI be used to create adaptive learning experiences where the level of challenges match to how students are responding to questions, but also, I think, a very real fear. Will students be doing their own work? Or will they be using chatGPT to write their paper? And so it’s going to challenge us to think differently about the kinds of assignments we give and where students take those assignments. So lots of questions that I think all of our faculty have to begin to think about, but we can’t pretend it’s not happening, that it’s not changing how students approach their work. And so we’ve got to be responsive.

John: I’m going to put in a plug for an event that SUNY will be sponsoring. There’s going to be an AI symposium taking place in Buffalo on May 21st. We’re working on a schedule for that, and we will include a link to any information about that in the show notes for anyone who might be interested in joining a discussion with many people from around SUNY about the implications of AI.

Chancellor King: There’s so much excitement around this. We had an AI task force this past semester that is now ongoing, and we had probably 80 faculty members across SUNY institutions participating in that and that was thinking about lots of different questions about the implications of AI. But I think this is a great chance for us to deepen collaboration across the SUNY system.

Rebecca: You really highlighted a wide range of both opportunities and challenges that institutions face as a whole. How do faculty see themselves in moving forward in facing some of the challenges in helping students achieve meaningful credentials or really meet meeting some of the demands of our very near future.

Chancellor King: The faculty are the heart and soul of SUNY. I visited all 64 campuses, as I mentioned, last year. I’m about halfway through visiting them all again. And I’m just continually inspired by the work I see happening across our campuses, just faculty members who are inspiring students, who are equipping students with critical skills that will help them in their professions and in their lives. So I’m very grateful for that. A couple of places where I think there are some real leadership opportunities, one is for faculty to play a role in supporting our recruitment efforts to make sure that when students of color, low-income students, first-gen students, are coming to campus, they are hearing a clear message from faculty that they are wanted. One of the worries I have about the Supreme Court decision last year ending race-conscious admissions, is that it sent a message to black, Latino, Indigenous students, you are not welcome in higher education. And we want to send the opposite message, we want to say there’s a place for every New Yorker at SUNY. Our classrooms are stronger when our student body is diverse; our faculties are stronger when they’re diverse; our research is better when diverse researchers are engaged in solving problems together. So recruitment is one opportunity. Second opportunity, I think, is to continually ask how do we evolve our instruction and our course content to align with our evolving students in our evolving society? Now, we’re always going to want students to engage with the great conversation about what is the good life, we’re always gonna read Plato and Aristotle. But at the same time, we got to think about how are the questions we’re asking maybe different given what our students face today. So I think about when I was at one of our campuses, speaking with a botany professor, who was saying that he’d really never had full enrollment in his course, he always had empty seats. But this past year, he was teaching a course in the horticulture of cannabis and waitlists. And it wasn’t to say that every student in that class is going to get a job in the cannabis industry, though certainly the cannabis industry is going to grow in New York. But that course will be a gateway to getting excited about agriculture and an interest in careers in agriculture, which are plentiful as a whole generation of folks in the agriculture industry retire. We have lots of need for folks with expertise in agriculture, sustainable agriculture, in particular. So maybe being in that course on the horticulture of cannabis will bring them into this new field. So it’s not that he’s teaching something entirely different, it’s kind of tapping into the intersection of his discipline and what students are curious about. Similarly, you think about health care, and the challenges we have in the healthcare sector, students are really interested in learning about racial health disparities, and understanding how we’re going to tackle those. And I’m not saying diverse students are interested in those questions, because they see the horrific maternal health disparities by race that we have, and they want to make it better. So we should talk about that in our nursing classes, in our public health classes, in our medical schools. So this evolution of our teaching and our content to meet the moment, I think, is hugely important. And then I would add, we are stronger together. And so collaboration across disciplines, collaboration across institutions, strengthening transfer pathways, for example. 80% of the students who start community college, say they want to earn a bachelor’s degree, but less than 20%, do. We can do better, we have to do better. And so those partnerships, not only institutional partnerships, so that credits transfer and those things, but also faculty collaboration. What do we advise students about which courses to take if they’re interested in a particular degree when they come to the four-year institution? How do we improve advising at the two-year institution? Those kinds of things are an important place where faculty can engage.

John: As you mentioned, SUNY has done quite a bit of work in easing transfer credit across institutions, between community colleges and four-year colleges. But we have those really poor success rates for students who plan to go on for a bachelor’s. Are there any other strategies that could be used to help ease that transition from community college into four-year programs?

Chancellor King: Absolutely. You know, we have a transfer task force with folks from across our two- and four-year institutions working on this set of questions. Some of the things that we’re seeing that are promising around the country: advising… crucial, particularly as you’re picking classes, as you’re thinking about your major and how it will translate into what you want to ultimately do in your career, improving advising at the community college level, particularly if, and we have some folks who are using transformation funds, some of the funding we got last year from Governor Hochul and the legislature to do this, particularly if you can get the four-year institution to either place their staff as the advisors on a two-year campus, or to work in very close partnership with the advisors on the two-year campus to help ease that navigation. Another issue is what I might describe as friction reduction. One of the things we started this past year, which we will continue to grow is a SUNY match process where we reach out directly to students in our two-year programs and saying, “You are directly admitted to these four-year institutions based on your academic record at the two-year institution,” because for a lot of students, especially first-gen students, it’s that feeling of “Well, college, it it really for me, is a four-year institution really for me, am I ready for a four-year institution.” But it can be transformative to get that letter, that personalized letter that says there is a place for you at the four-year institution. And then look, there’s lowering financial barriers. That’s critical. One of the things I’m excited about that the governor announced in her State of the State and included in her budget is Universal FAFSA, making sure that students complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, because that’s how they know what resources are available to them. And some of our community college students, unfortunately, they don’t realize the aid they could have and so they’re struggling to afford the two-year institution and making the choice not to pursue a four-year degree because they don’t know the Pell dollars, the TAP dollars that could be there for them. That’s why we need them to do the FAFSA. Last year in New York, students left $200 million in federal aid unclaimed because of not completing the FAFSA. And so Governor Hochul wants to require K-12 to work with us in higher ed, to make sure that every student either completes the FAFSA, completes the DREAM Act application if they’re undocumented, or they and their family would complete a waiver that says “I realize there are billions of dollars available for post-secondary education, and I don’t want any. I’m not gonna fill out the form.” But at least we’ll know that every student and family understood the options available to them.

Rebecca: Sounds like some really great opportunities. I’m watching our time and knowing that we’re nearing our end of our time. But I’m really curious, before we get to our last question, what you’re most excited about working on in the next year?

Chancellor King: I love that question. I’ll tell you one of the things that I’m very passionate about. I first worked on when I was at the U.S. Education Department, President Obama had an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper, which was about trying to improve outcomes for boys and young men of color. And as part of that initiative, I was very involved in kind of leading the agency work on that initiative when I was Deputy Secretary then continued that as Secretary. And one of the initiatives that we launched was something called Second Chance Pell. And the history there is that in 94 in the crime bill, there are many problematic provisions, but one that was especially dumb was a provision that banned access to Pell grants for folks who are incarcerated. Now, of course, the evidence is any educational experience while incarcerated reduces the likelihood of recidivism. And completing a degree while incarcerated dramatically reduces the likelihood of returning to prison. So shamefully, this was part of the tough on crime punishment first kind of focus of the mid 90s. They banned access to Pell Grants, as a result programs in prisons all over the country closed. Some remained open through philanthropy, but many many closed. We wanted to change that, and so we used our experimental authority under the Higher Education Act to create a pilot program called Second Chance Pell that would allow, at that time, 65 colleges and universities to use Pell grants with students who are incarcerated. We launched that while I was Secretary. And then, when I was at Ed Trust, a coalition of civil rights groups, criminal justice reform organizations, education equity focused organizations worked together to get folks to visit those programs, members of Congress, Governors to highlight the incredible stories of the students who graduated from higher ed in prison programs. And we were able to persuade Congress to change the law and restore Pell access generally. So today, Pell Grants are available for incarcerated students. SUNY is already the largest provider of higher education in the state’s prisons with over 700 students, but we are trying to grow that effort. I want there to be a higher education program in every correctional facility in New York State. I want to make sure that we grow the number of bachelor’s programs. We have a lot of associate’s degree programs, but I want to make sure that students have the opportunity to go on to their bachelor’s degree. I was at graduation last week, mid-State Correctional Facility, five students graduating from Herkimer Community College. It was so beautiful and inspiring to see the transformative power of education, to hear students talk about how the access to higher education had changed them, changed their lives, changed their prospects for when they come home, but changed them as people. The faculty members were crying, the family members were crying, the folks in the correctional facility were so excited for the students who were graduating. It was truly, truly inspiring. So I’m very excited about that work. I’m looking forward to growing that work. But then more broadly, I’m excited that SUNY is on the move. SUNY is delivering high quality, affordable public higher education, driving economic opportunity for New York State. We are working to improve recruitment, retention, and completion. We are advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are doing the things that we ought to be to better serve New Yorkers. So I’m super excited about our work together.

John: Those are really important programs. And we’re so glad to hear all of this. We always end with the question: “What’s next?” I know you’ve already addressed a lot of this, but there’s so much more.

Chancellor King: Well, you know, we try to organize our work around the aspiration that SUNY has to be the best public statewide system of higher education in the United States. And we’re the largest comprehensive system, but it’s very important that we work to be the best system. To me that means we’ve got to deliver on student success. We’ve got to deliver on research and scholarship, the Governor’s asked us to double research and scholarship across the system. We’ve got to deliver on diversity, equity, and inclusion, that means diversity of our students, our faculty, our leadership, across our institutions. It means implementing the diversity, equity and inclusion, general education requirement, which is really nation leading to say every student is going to be exposed to diversity, equity, inclusion content across all of our institutions. And we’ve got to deliver on economic development and upward mobility, which has been the SUNY tradition for 75 years. So I organize how I think about the work. And certainly our board is organizing its work around those four pillars in order to achieve that goal of being the best statewide public higher education system. In the short term, we got a state budget that hopefully will be enacted on April1. So we got a lot of work to do to make sure we are making the case for investment in SUNY and helping people to see there’s a nine to one return on each state dollar invested in SUNY in terms of the economic impact. We need legislators to know that and we need to work with them to make sure that they are investing in the great work that our faculty are doing.

Rebecca: Well thank you so much for your insight on the current state of higher ed and all the opportunities that we have to improve our society.

Chancellor King: Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to join you and thanks for fostering dialogue on important issues.

John: And thank you for giving up your time so generously and all the work that you’ve done and are continuing to do.

Chancellor King: 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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314. Handbook of Online Higher Ed

Since its start in the late 1990s, asynchronous online instruction has spread throughout the world and has been the subject of extensive experimentation and study. In this episode, Safary Wa-Mbaleka, Kelvin Thompson, and Leni Casimiro join us to discuss their new handbook that examines effective practices in online learning from a global perspective.

Safary is an Associate Professor of Leadership in Higher Education at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has authored and co-authored more than 40 scholarly journal articles and more than 20 books and book chapters. Kelvin is the Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation at the University of Louisville. Kelvin developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of the Blended Learning Toolkit, and he co-hosts TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast. Leni is a Professor of Education, the Associate Dean of the AIIAS Graduate School and Chair of its Education Department and the Director of AIIAS Online, the virtual campus of the Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies (AIIAS) in the Philippines. Kelvin, and Leni are frequent invited speakers on topics related to online instruction. They are the co-editors of The Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Since its start in the late 1990s, asynchronous online instruction has spread throughout the world and has been the subject of extensive experimentation and study. In this episode, we discuss a new handbook that examines effective practices in online learning from a global perspective.

[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.

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John: Our guests today are Safary Wa-Mbaleka, Kelvin Thompson, and Leni Casimiro. Safary is an Associate Professor of Leadership in Higher Education at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has authored and co-authored more than 40 scholarly journal articles and more than 20 books and book chapters. Kelvin is the Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation at the University of Louisville. Kelvin developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of the Blended Learning Toolkit, and he co-hosts TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast. Leni is a Professor of Education, the Associate Dean of the AIIAS Graduate School and Chair of its Education Department and the Director of AIIAS Online, the virtual campus of the Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies (AIIAS) in the Philippines. Kelvin, and Leni are frequent invited speakers on topics related to online instruction. They are the co-editors of The Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education, which we’ll be talking about today. Welcome Safary and Leni and welcome back, Kelvin.

Safary: Thank you.

Leni: Thank you.

Kelvin: Good to be here.

Safary: A pleasure to be here.

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

Safary: I’m having water this morning.

Rebecca: A key ingredient to tea it might add. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: How about you, Leni?

Leni: I used green tea, particularly this Japanese matcha. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Nice. How about you, Kelvin?

Kelvin: I have deconstructed tea. That’s also called water.

Rebecca: [LAUGHTER] Popular globally.

John: And speaking of globally, Rebecca and I are both drinking Moon Bird tea, which is a gift from one of our listeners in France who sent this to us a few weeks ago. So again…

Safary: Wow.

John: …thank you, Myriam.

Rebecca: Yeah, it has a nice hint of pear and elderflower.

John: …which is also a green tea.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the SAGE Handbook of Online Higher Education. Could you tell us a bit about the origin of this book project?

Safary: The origin of this project is actually something that has to do with me having worked with Kelvin several years ago at the University of Central Florida. And right after that, I decided to work in the Philippines and that’s where I met with Leni Casimiro and we worked together. And at both institutions, we were working with online education. And eventually I was transferred to work for two years in Kenya. During the COVID-19. I happened to be in Kenya, and I quickly saw the great need of people wanting to have online education. The resources went up in the place. The things were scattered all over the place. And immediately the idea came that we needed a project that captured the whole world because now this was a worldwide phenomenon, it was no longer something peculiar to Kenya or Philippines or U.S., the whole world was in need of a tool like this. And that’s how I reached out to Kelvin and to Leni.. Thankfully, they both agreed to be part of the project. And I think, from my perspective, that’s where it came from. I don’t know about them… how they think about this? [LAUGHTER]

Leni: Well, for me, it’s really a big project that we did, combining the different parts of the world. You see where Kelvin comes from, representing the West, I represent the opposite, the East. And although Safary comes from the East as well, but he can represent the African continent. And so this really makes the book a global project, really a blend of different perspectives. And so I can say that online learning is represented all over the world in this particular book. And this is indeed, a big surprise to all the readers and a big discovery for everyone.

John: Speaking of readers, what is the intended audience of this book?

Kelvin: Well, I mean, honestly, I would say anyone, anywhere, around the whole planet, who in any way touches online or digital education, should access this book. It’s great for libraries and institutions to acquire and be in their communities. It’s a big book. There’s stuff in there for everybody. So I think it’s a great resource.

Rebecca: Speaking of the size of the book, the handbook contains 50 chapters. Can you talk about how you selected those chapters?

Kelvin: I think the scope and the sequence and the layout of the chapters and the sections sources originally to Safary’s proposal with the publisher, but it was intended to be rather comprehensive with sections like fundamentals and student support and administration and instructional design, instructional delivery, regional specifics, particular regions around the world, and how online education might differ a little bit in, say, the African context versus the European context. But over time, as we were recruiting authors, and as the writing process started, you get a little bit of evolution, the sections might morph a little bit, the distinctives of a given chapter might adjust based on interest and specializations of the authors. So that’s a little bit of the insight into the evolution. But I credit Safary for the vision, which I would say, is probably about 80 plus percent of what he originally had envisioned in the layout. That’s my guess. Safary, would you agree with that?

Safary: Yeah, the thing is that, when you work on a huge book like this, especially a handbook for Sage, they want to have the complete plan when you submit your proposal. Before I can get my co-editors to agree with me, they need to have kind of ideas, okay, this is what I have in mind. So usually, when I work on a handbook like this, I come up with a rough draft. And Kelvin and Leni were very good in catching certain things that I wouldn’t have caught because of their expertise, their experience, and their regions that they represent. And so in the end, what we have here is a product of the Table of Contents was really the product of these three brains that are speaking today.

Leni: I really liked the way Safary has chosen the chapters of this book. Well, we can say that he really originated the choice of these chapters. As you can see, from the perspective of a reader, when you look at the content, you can look in the sequencing, and you will find that you are actually looking into the step-by-step development, or the step-by-step process of engaging in online education. I will say it’s almost like a manual, almost every step that you will go through in undertaking online education in your institution is covered in this book. That’s why it’s really a very important book for every school to have.

John: We had some challenges coming up with a brief intro for each of you, because each of you has done so much with online education in many different roles in many different places. But you also have an editorial board for this book, which is a little bit different than many other books that we’ve seen in terms of handbooks. What was the role of the editorial board in putting this handbook together?

Safary: Yes, we had an editorial board. When you have a project of this magnitude, it is really important to have experts from different parts, especially at the global perspective of experts, and of course, experts on the different topics that are represented in the handbook. As much as we have experience with online education, we cannot assume to know it all… areas where we definitely need help. And so we selected very well known, very well recognized experts from different parts of the world. As far as online education is concerned, all the names that are there are people who are very well respected in the field of online education within their respective countries. The role they played was, for them to be our experts in checking the accuracy and the quality and the completeness of the chapters that were submitted to us. So basically, each chapter went to two to three reviewers and the editorial board members were the primary reviewers to help us really catch everything… and the work they did, I know that some chapters had more feedback than others, but I can say that contribution they gave through their feedback was very substantive in improving this handbook. I don’t know, Leni, how you found that when you’re working with the editorial members who are assigned to you?

Leni: Yeah, actually the editors we chose, I can say they are truly excellent and helpful. During the early parts of the writing of the chapters we lead editors are having like a tug of war with the chapter authors. They tend to bargain their thoughts with us, but when the editorial board came into the picture, it gave a more balanced outlook into writing the chapters. And so we really appreciate their services. The other thing is that this editorial board members are experts in the area and so we can truly depend on them. Their feedback were truly much valued and contributed much to the excellence of the contents of this book.

Rebecca: So the handbook is divided into seven sections. Can you provide a brief overview of each of those sections to give us the lay of the land?

Leni: Oh Yeah, seven sections, it’s nice to give an overview for people to know what the book contains. First section, of course, is the fundamentals of online education. It contains the introduction to the topic of the book, online learning, and some variations in online delivery, like blended, MOOC and ERT, emergency remote teaching, we just really call it ERT, and that became popular during the pandemic. The second section, online education around the world. This section is the most colorful part of the book, at least for me. Because it tours us around the world and gives us a view of how online education grew in varied contexts like US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East. The third section, Online Instructional Design, this section now brings us to the T-cell of online learning, the design of online instruction with focus on how learning happens online. This is now the more serious part of the book. While we came from the most colorful, we now go to the serious part of the book. And then the fourth one, Online Instructional Delivery, this section focuses on the hammer and nail of online learning, the actual online teaching, and this is the most exciting part. Because this is now the delivery, the previous one was the most serious part, this one is the most exciting part. And then perhaps, Kelvin, can you say about the fifth section [LAUGHTER] Instructional Technology for Online Education?

Kelvin: Here’s what I would say about that, if you’ve got the most serious, you talked about the most exciting that you talked about, maybe the fifth instructional technology for online education is the most invisible, maybe that’s what it is. Nobody thinks about plumbing until it doesn’t work. [LAUGHTER]

Leni: Thank you. So that’s technology, I would say this section is essential, because you cannot teach without knowing how to use technology [LAUGHTER]. And the sixth section, Online Education Administration and Management, I would say this is the driver’s seat of online bandwagon [LAUGHTER]. Online education can never prosper without the support of the school administration. So, leading school reforms, like entering the field of online education requires certain strategies to be certain of success. Therefore, I would say this section will indeed equip the readers with those skills, perhaps Safary, can tell us what section seven is?

Safary: I would say the last section is the Customer Service, given that the students are the customers. So the customer service, how to make sure we deliver the best customer service to the online students. And so it discusses all those different aspects of how to really prepare, plan effective service to the students, because many times when people are migrating from face-to-face to online or integrating online education, they forget that online students actually need serious support. And this support definitely needs to be defined. And people who are dealing with the students need to be trained. And so the last chapter actually deals exactly with that.

Leni: For me, because I was looking at the table of contents, and I was smiling in my mind, wow, this is really neatly done. And so this works came to my mind, and I said, Oh, the seventh section, this section focuses on the heart of every online classroom, the students. And so because the students are the reason why we offer online learning, thus we ought to know how we should support them.

Rebecca: One of the things that I love about working on collaborative projects that are really big, and then you have these opportunities to reflect together, is how you summarize what you did. It’s probably really different than while you were right in the middle of it. And it’s fun watching the facial expressions and things as you guys are describing the different sections.

John: With 50 chapters, there’s a great deal of breadth and depth on these topics. In section one, though, you address two topics which are not always considered as part of traditional, at least, online education, which is the use of MOOCs and ERT, emergency remote teaching. But these have played fairly important roles. Could you talk a little bit about the role of MOOCs and Emergency Remote Teaching in the larger environment of online higher education?

Leni: As I see it, MOOC and ERT are connected to the overall theme of the book, because technically they are both delivered online. Online learning can be synchronous or asynchronous. And it’s mostly taken asynchronously while ERT is done synchronously, because it is generally a replication of the face-to-face classroom through the web. However, there are certain arguments in the field as to whether can we classify these two under online learning, because they are believed to not use the principles of effective online teaching. And they say, is their instructional design in ERT? There are more questions to raise to the point that some people believe they should not be called online learning. But for me, we have a common denominator, course delivery through the web. Maybe we can hear from my co-editors here, Kelvin and Safary, what they think about it?

Kelvin: I was thinking, John, when you asked that question, I think the combination of Emergency Remote Teaching and Massive Open Online Courses, it’s part of the popular conception of what online education is, it’s sort of like what a layperson might think, is, it’s just one big thing. So if you didn’t address Emergency Remote Teaching, Massive Open Online Courses, maybe even Blended or Hybrid learning, those mutations, it might not provide quite the same way in for the broadest possible audience. But then, once we’ve ushered you into the house, through the front door, I hope we do a good job of taking you on a more detailed guided tour through the nuances and everything that online education can be, without just being stuck at that surface level.

Safary: If I may add something to the ERT. Personally, the reason why I wanted to see this chapter there was that outside of the United States and maybe Canada, and a little bit of Latin America, when ERT came, Emergency Remote Teaching came, many people call it online education. And as we know, online education, the way we know it traditionally, is much more than translating your face-to-face class to a Zoom class or Google meet class. And let’s face it, that the word there is emergency. This was an emergency modality, which obviously emergency is never the best option, it means better than the chaos that you’re going through. And so many people who didn’t know online education, they came to believe that Emergency Remote Teaching means online education. And many people who were against online education to start with, it was like, “Okay, we have already said that this thing is really bad because it was an emergency.” So it was very important to distinguish what Emergency Remote Teaching is. And in the future, if somebody wants to use that for another calamity that happens, then they know what steps to take, but it does not replace what is known, what we define as quality online education.

Rebecca: One of the parts of your book, The second section is about online education around the world. And getting that tour around the world is not something we typically get the opportunity to have. So can you talk a little bit about what some of the global differences in how online higher education is structured and practiced across continents and regions?

Safary: This section came up as we were trying to make the book global. We really wanted to hear the voices of the people from around the world and not just the United States… the United States being the lead on online education, no question about that. We wanted to know where things are in different regions that were represented. We had to even go online to try to track people down from different countries. It was not easy finding people from certain regions where we didn’t have a network. So as a result, we’re able to bring on board chapters from different parts of the world. We had a chapter from the United States, we had a chapter from Europe, from Canada, from Asia, from Latin America, from Africa, from Australia, and from Middle East. So we were able to see what was happening in each one of them. And these chapters we had, they were kind of similar in a way where we wanted to know what is happening, what are the challenges, what are the achievements that people have in those regions, so that people from those regions who decided to do more work on online education, they have a place where they can learn of what is happening in the whole region from this book. They can have this as a reference to understand what was happening in their region. It is true that when you have one chapter, for example, I co-authored a chapter on Africa, because I was still in Africa at that time. It’s a chapter that’s covering 52 countries, you cannot really cover 52 countries, we just had to have illustration from some of African countries, because there’s no way we have data on all the 52 countries, but at least, there were some common themes that were coming up from a different African countries if I can speak from that specific region.

Leni: I can speak from the perspective of an Asian because I come from Asia. And I would say, we cannot deny that online education started in the West. But because we live in a connected world, it spread easily. Basically, I can see a lot of similarities around the world. The only differences I noticed, because your question says what are some of the global differences in how online education is structured and practiced? Now, I would say the only differences I noticed are the approaches to online learning, depending on the level of their maturity, in using this modality, and the resonance of the context they serve. Institutions that have been engaged in online learning for a long time definitely deal with issues that are different from those of newcomers, the needs of the context they serve also differ, so the strategies utilized also differ. One thing I would highlight, though, is that you can clearly see the creativity and continuity of people in different parts of the world in running online education. And we still can learn from each other. That’s why I said a while ago, the section on the global online education is really colorful.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think is really interesting about that section, is that it can also give us insight as instructors that teach a global audience about what the contexts are that students might be coming from. And that’s something that we often don’t have a little bit of insight into.

Safary: I think that is a very good point. Now that we have online education, people are teaching in many different countries. I remember just a couple of weeks ago, I was approached by one of my former students who wanted me to teach a class in the Caribbean. If things worked out for me, for that class, I would have just glanced at that chapter that covers a little bit of the Caribbean and see what I need to watch out for. So that is definitely a good point for the section on the different regions. In this handbook.

John: When online education first started, there wasn’t really that much known about what would work effectively. And as online education evolved, we saw the role of instructional design become an important part of the practice of online education. And section three deals with online instructional design. And that’s helped facilitate and inform online education, along with a lot of research that’s been done since the early stages. How have instructional design practices evolved since the early stages of online education in the latter part of last century?

Kelvin: That’s a good question. And I guess I’ve been in this field watching this first hand and touching it for about 25 years now. So I sometimes say not exactly the first floor of the building, but just one step above. And what I would say is that when I started in the late 90s, what we saw a lot was adaptation of traditional instructional systems design models and practices, that is constructs that were used quite often in corporate education. See if this takes you back to the past: CD ROM development, military learners. Those kinds of methods, practices, and models were adapted to this online context. And some of that’s constrained, like you’re making a system, like it’s a bounded system that was, quite often the context, like a CD ROM. And now you’re talking about the internet, a network open system. And I remember some of those early days, like, “Okay, what can we learn from these models? How can we adapt those?” Over time though, we learned that this is a unique context, which then began to have its own models and practices and processes and research and iterations and development. And I think of even things like much newer developments, like alongside of constructs like inclusive pedagogy, we see practices and thrusts, like inclusive design, as being a very specialized subset. So we’ve got a very robust research and professional practice literature that has grown up and these, arguably, two and a half decades of online education experience to draw upon. And I guess I’ll just say this, about that. Throughout my time in this field, what I’ve seen is that online tends to make the formerly invisible, visible; formerly implicit, explicit. And I think that evolution of instructional design and development field, it has learned from that. Online education has drawn us along in what does it mean to bring learners in from really anywhere and bring them together in a learning community, and how do we excel in that. That’s been a really rich progression over these last two and a half decades.

Safary: If I may add to that, the reason why we had this section was that many people who are new to online education, they think that online education is about uploading all the files that you have been using face to face, and then let the students read that, and that’s online education. It leads to a lot of frustration from the students because there was no instructional design for online learning. And so we needed to have a section that would guide people into that. And also for instructional designers in college and universities where they already have instructional designers. Some of them have not gotten a degree in instructional design. So they have limited knowledge. They just happen to know a little bit more than everybody else, but they don’t really have a solid foundation. And so that section helps to kind of guide people in the proper instructional design for online learning.

Rebecca: So sections four and five focus on online instructional delivery and instructional technology. These are topics that we love to talk about and have episodes of this podcast on. But given the time constraints, we probably can’t dig in fully here. But can you help us identify some of the most important changes that have occurred in how well designed online courses are taught?

Leni: That’s a nice question. Kelvin also said a while ago, he was mentioning about the early years of online instructional design, I would say, perhaps 1998 to 2000, those are the early years I’ve been involved, still in the planning stages of online delivery. Most of the online courses we developed were primarily text based, and are delivered asynchronously. That was after the military, Kelvin used, online learning, it was already in the university. Why text based? Because even our students, in the context we are serving also did not have the capability or the capacity to access videos or higher level technology tools. That’s why we designed the way they can access us. And so, yes, it was primarily text based and asynchronous. However, through the years, I would say two forces caused the major changes in the way we design online courses, first, technological developments, particularly in instructional technology. And second, changes in the needs or nature of our stakeholders, the students. Well, technological developments without a doubt have increased the repertoire of instructional media that we can use in designing truly engaging online courses. But as I’ve said earlier, technology is not the heart of online learning… it’s our students. And we saw how the nature of our online students change over time as well. While many of them were happy with plain text based asynchronous online courses during the early days, now they want more real-time meetings. And the flexibility they want is indeed tremendous, I tell you. We notice that there is a greater demand now for more flexible and personalized learning approaches. And these topics are dealt with in this handbook. I know Kelvin has written on this. And some other chapters also addressed this flexible learning, personalized learning approaches. These are now the needs and demands of the new generation of online students.

John: This is bringing me back to a time when I started back in 1997 teaching online when many of the students had 300 baud… [LAUGHTER] …or 1200 baud modems, and you couldn’t do much more than text. And I remember putting in some flash-based videos, and many students couldn’t access those because they didn’t have the download speed, especially students in more rural areas. So there was a lot of resistance to online education when it was first introduced, which is one of the reasons why I think instructional design practices became a part of early online education to help ensure the quality of that. And we do have, in most institutions a fairly elaborate process of instructional design assistance and instructional design review for online courses, which is something that’s never really happened in the same way for most face-to-face courses. Might it be time to start applying some of the techniques and practices of design that’s being used for online course delivery to in-person course delivery?

Safary: I remember about 15 years ago, I was training faculty on online teaching in the Caribbean. And I remember many of them, at the end of the training, saying, “I have improved my face-to-face teaching because of the training that I have been going through for online teaching.” So I definitely believe that if people get the proper training in online teaching, they can use that knowledge to improve face-to-face teaching. Because let’s face it, many people are teaching not because they have a degree in education, but because they have a degree in whatever field they come from, they have never learned how to teach. And so when they go through the training for online teaching, they discover a lot of principles that they should have even been using face to face. So I definitely agree with you on that one.

Kelvin: Yeah, it’s true. I say it all the time online makes the formerly implicit, explicit; formerly invisible, visible. And I think that’s why online has been a vehicle for applying thoughtful design and teaching practices and the improvement thereof. Once you sort of concretize the elements that make up an online education experience, then you can see well, how are they arrayed? Are they lined up properly? Does this cause lead to the desired effect, and you can work on improvement, no offense to anyone in this, but when we just are dealing in the ephemeral, we will walk into a space, four walls and a door, and we say words into the air, it’s much harder to see how those parts fit together or don’t. And it’s harder to be reflective. So, I think that’s the reason that online education has brought more emphasis to potential improvements, continuous improvements, and so I welcome it as a vehicle for a more thoughtful process in general. I love this elegant turn of phrase Caroline Boswell says she frames teaching as a student success intervention. Or as I put it, I’m one of those odd people who sees a connection between teaching and learning. And not everybody does.

Rebecca: You’re kind of queuing up our next question perfectly Kelvin. The final section of your book is really about student support. And our students are often distributed when we’re teaching online. So what are some of the biggest challenges in terms of supporting students that are in these online programs or online courses?

Kelvin: Yeah, I would welcome Leni’s and Safary’s viewpoint on this as well. But to me, I’ll keep it simple and say that the biggest challenge is the diversity of student profiles. The different backgrounds, the multifaceted demographics, and resource or not resource, or technological connection or not technological connection, that diversity makes it awfully hard to assure kind of an equitable experience for everyone. So that’s the gap that emerges, that student support is trying to offer… not to mention the diversity of approaches to design and development in the actual experience. But I’m curious what Leni and Safary would say to that.

Leni: I would go for the opposite, on the side of the teachers, I would say the greatest challenge in student support is personalizing your support. It’s related to your diversity. Almost every online student has her unique needs and contexts. So considering different personalities and backgrounds as well, you may be able to personalize your support. But in the name of efficiency, you’ll find yourself dehumanizing the process. What do I mean by this? Well, machines can never replace human touch. And human touch is what every online student needs.

Safary: If I may speak a little bit from experience I had in Kenya during the COVID-19, we migrated our classes to the online delivery. And I quickly realized that… and this was something that was going on in all of Africa, I know this because I was involved in different international association for online education all over the continent…. and so we were meeting and discussing some of these issues. The major challenges that were going on at that time, I don’t know about today, were dealing with infrastructure, because most universities that didn’t have online education platforms, or online education structural systems, so the technology was not in place. Many students there were not access because the internet was extremely slow, some were using loads of data to access the materials and they would run out. Some had issues with electricity. These are things we take for granted in the West. These are the not issues that we will discuss even in textbooks of online education, but they are real issues that cannot be ignored. And so that was a major challenge in supporting online students, because the infrastructure was not in place. And I think the issue is still the same. But more and more work is being done. I remember, for example, in Kenya, what the government did, they gave the free data access to all the faculty in the whole country, as long as it was used only for instructional purposes [LAUGHTER]. If you want to use it for something else, it wouldn’t work. I mean, that was quite creative, to try to help people to help education move forward, because everything was just stuck because of COVID-19.

John: Over the past year, we’ve seen a fairly explosive growth and use of generative AI large language models, including chat GPT, Claude, and a few others that have come out very recently. And that opens up a lot of interesting opportunities, but also some challenges for online education, particularly concerning the assessment of asynchronous learning. How do you see online education adapting in response to the widespread availability of tools like this, which will only become more powerful over the next few years?

Kelvin: It’s sort of the very definition and epitome of disruptive innovation or disruptive technology. And just to be clear about this, I don’t think it’s limited or focused on asynchronous online education, I think it’s everything. For me, it’s really an opportunity to address learning and assessment of learning much more meaningfully, and I’ll use one of Leni’s words, more personalized and relational. I think one of the things we’re seeing with the injection of these various forms of artificial intelligence into the learning setting is the value proposition of the human. And I think it was Cathy Davidson, years ago, from HASTAC said something like, “If we faculty can be replaced by a computer we should be.” That is, if all you’re offering is something that is easily rendered more efficient and scalable by a machine then, well, what are you doing it for? I think that the opportunity to really gauge learning, which is a very personal and a meaningful thing, we act like it’s something that’s kind of homogenized and industrialized, but learning… I don’t know what learning is, frankly, I can’t crack open a human and see what all is happening with the connections and making of meaning in all the background experiences. All I can do is get insight, but in dialogue, in the creation of artifacts I get a glimpse. If we’re product oriented, to the exclusion of the process, and to the exclusion of the human context, well, that can be certainly disrupted, maybe stolen by artificial intelligence in machines. But if we keep the emphasis on humans, on “Well, John, tell me about this…” that’s more meaningful. I learned a practice a long time ago from a faculty member that I studied under, where she adopted a practice of a learning summary. And in any course, again, that’s just one artifact, but it gives a glimpse into the articulation of what learning is really about. So I think we need to push the envelope in “What does authentic assessment mean? What does meaningful learning look like?” Now, that’s hard to do at scale. Are you going to have a personal oral defense with every student for every assignment, probably not. But if we see artifacts, and products, as breadcrumb trails leading to a destination of a more substantive dialogical process, well, then maybe that’s something. So I don’t think we know yet how this is going to play out. And I think your listeners are gonna find cold comfort from me in getting to an easy solution. But I think the future of responding to generative AI is to lean more into the human and the relational than less.

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

Safary: Well, as far as this project is concerned, what is next really, we want to continue building a community of online higher education scholars, practitioners, so that this momentum that has been created by this book can continue, because this is one of the few maybe rare books that really have so much global contribution to online education. Many of the books that are written, they’re usually kind of regional to a specific region of the world. And so this is the first time we have a network of, I think, around 100 people who contributed to this, coming from many different countries. And I feel this has created synergy on the discussion of online education in a way that we should not let that go. So one of the things that we have been talking about is the possibility of holding a summit on online higher education in the next few months, once everybody has gotten a chance to hold a copy of this book, and to bring different experts together from different parts of the world, and try to address online education from different parts of the world, while addressing common issues such as assessment, which is one of the major controversial issues anywhere have been, everybody talks about the challenges of online assessments. So that’s things like this, and probably this artificial intelligence, which is a new thing, we may want to go deeper into that… we’re not able to dig too deep with that, although we addressed it in the book. But we didn’t go too deeply because it was still kind of new ChatGPT was just coming out when we were finishing the handbook. And so that is one of the things that we are looking into, there is another handbook in the making with SAGE that will focus specifically on instructional design in higher education. So that would be like an extension of this project. So we want to continue building on this work, because we consider it’s very important.

Leni: I’m really optimistic about the next steps on this because it’s like a seminal book that really got there’s a global perspective, as Safary says it’s not the same as the other online learning books. So we can also see a lot of developments coming up. And so I will say, this book is just step one, the next steps will really be coming up definitely, because the field is always growing. We have seen its growth, and it will still grow. And so there’s more to follow, I believe.

Rebecca: Well, thank you all for joining us. I know that our listeners will really enjoy the handbook and all that it has to offer.

John: Well, thank you, and it’s great talking to all of you and we’re looking forward to reading the book.

Safary: Thank you so much for the opportunity. Really appreciate that and wish everybody a wonderful reading experience.

Kelvin: Thanks for having us, Rebecca and John.

Leni: Thank you 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.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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301. A Return to Rigor?

Some faculty have advocated a return to “rigor” to address perceptions of growing student disengagement in our classes. In this episode, Kevin Gannon joins us to discuss an alternative approach that provides students with cognitive challenges in a supportive environment. Kevin is a history professor and the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence at Queen’s University of Charlotte. He is also the author of Radical Hope: a Teaching Manifesto, which is available from West Virginia University Press.

Show Notes

  • Gannon, Kevin (2020). Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.
  • Gannon, Kevin (2023). “Why Calls for a ‘Return to Rigor’ Are Wrong.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. May 22.
  • Imad, M. (2022). Trauma‐informed education for wholeness: Strategies for faculty & advisors. New Directions for Student Services, 2022(177), 39-47.
  • Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed, New York (Herder & Herder) 1970.
  • Boucher, Ellen (2016). “It’s Time to Ditch Our Deadlines.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 22.
  • Vygotskii L.S. (1984). “Problemy detskoi (vozrastnoi psikhologii).” In Sobranie sochinenii v 6-ti tomakh, vol. 4, pp. 243–432. Moscow: Pedagogika
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2023). Mind over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. Beacon Press.
  • Jack, Jordynn and Viji Sathy (2021). “It’s Time to Cancel the Word ‘Rigor.’” The Chronicle of Higher Education. September 24.

Show Transcript

John: Some faculty have advocated a return to “rigor” to address perceptions of growing student disengagement in our classes. In this episode, we discuss an alternative approach that provides students with cognitive challenges in a supportive environment.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: ….and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer….

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Kevin Gannon. Kevin is a history professor and the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence at Queen’s University of Charlotte. He is also the author of Radical Hope: a Teaching Manifesto, which is available from West Virginia University Press. Welcome back, Kevin.

Kevin: Thanks. Great to be back with you all.

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

Kevin: I am drinking Cheerwine because I’m in North Carolina now. And this is how we roll in this state. And it’s so damn hot outside, a hot beverage is the most unappetizing suggestion right now.

Rebecca: All right, we’ll let it slide. [LAUGHTER]

John: I would have been tempted to have Cheerwine because it does have that whole North Carolina flavor, which I had never heard of until I came down here, the first time in 1987. But it’s incredibly popular.

Rebecca: What is it?

Kevin: It’s a cherry soda, basically. You got to be ready for sugar. You got to get your pancreas in shape and then prepare to go, but it’s quite tasty.

John: It’s a very inexpensive and popular cherry soda.

Rebecca: Interesting. It sounds like medicine.

John: No, it’s more sugary than medicinal.

Rebecca: Okay.

John: …but Duke, some time before last year, removed all of the soda from the vending machines and every place where they serve beverages on campus. You only have choices of healthy drinks: water, fruit juices, iced tea, they have of course, because it is North Carolina.

Rebecca: Is it sweet tea then?

John: It is not sweet tea, it is unsweetened tea. So I have a Tea Forte black currant tea that came down with me in my new Duke University mug.

Rebecca: And I have an Irish Breakfast tea because it’s 90 degrees outside and I have a hot tea because… I don’t know why. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I would not be drinking tea if I were not sitting in a very nicely air conditioned classroom here at Duke. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your May 22 Chronicle article where you address the arguments that some people have raised advocating a return to rigor as a solution to what seems to have been a substantial reduction in student engagement Since the start of the pandemic. What do you think is the source of the disengagement that faculty have been perceiving?

Kevin: Well, I think there’s a lot that goes into it. But I will say that I think it’s important for us to remember that there’s: A) no one cause or explanation for it, which leads to B) there’s no one solution that’s going to fix it all. And we know this, I think, but in the day-to-day practice or dealing with this room full of disengaged students, it’s hard to remember that sometimes. And so I think the root cause of this disengagement comes from the fact that we went through and are still dealing with the effects of rolling trauma on a global scale. And we can talk about trauma-informed pedagogy all we want, but it’s not going to erase the fact that trauma happened and for some of our students, and for some of us, continues to happen as well. And of course, what we saw as a result of that was the pandemic laid bare so many of the other things that were already in place that were unsustainable, and didn’t let us hide from those things anymore. So whether we’re talking about the so-called racial reckoning of the summer of 2020, or we’re talking about the ways in which people from different socio-economic groups experienced the pandemic and or healthcare as a result of that. And we’re in an age now of sort of creeping authoritarianism, pseudo-fascism, whatever you want to call it. I don’t think anybody could realistically expect folks to bring all of their cognitive energies to bear in a classroom with all of this going on in the background. It’s like trying to read a book while you’re in the spin cycle of a washing machine. There’s no way. And I think we can talk about creating spaces that are sanctuaries from that, but I don’t think that we alone can solve all of the things that are leading to disengagement. In fact, disengagement, the diversion of cognitive bandwidth, defense mechanisms, these are all things that are actually, I would argue, fairly healthy responses to everything that we’re seeing around us. And we need to have the sort of empathy and understanding of what many of our students and ourselves are going through to allow space for that to happen.

Rebecca: Yeah, sometimes it feels like there’s a request to just snap out of it.

Kevin: Right. One of the refrains I’ve had over and over is we’re not going to pedagogy our way out of like systemic collapse. And so I think Mays Imad actually put it very well, when she talks about learning as a sanctuary. Our classes can be a sanctuary from this, and that’s important. And we should be doing that work and we should be providing those spaces and curating those spaces and nurturing those spaces for ourselves and for our students, but to put all the pressure upon educators to get students “reconnected,” despite everything else that’s happening around us, I just think it’s unrealistic, and it sets us up for failure. And the same is true, I would argue, for K to 12. Teachers, during the pandemic, educators were expected to sort of fill in the gaps of all of the missing social services over and above “just education.” And I think that when we talk about this disconnection, there’s a danger of us moving into that space where we’re being expected to solve systemic problems, when we are not in a position where we’re able to do so. And in fact, we are suffering from the effects of those problems, in many ways the same as our students.

John: And at the same time, I know our campus at least, and I think, throughout the US, we’ve seen an increase in the diversity of our student bodies. There’s many more first-generation students coming into our classes, there’s many students from historically minoritized groups who simply were not generally attending, and those students often come in with less knowledge of, as you note in your article, the hidden curriculum of education. We have to help them learn that curriculum. And that brings us to that whole question of the push to rigor. In the article, you describe two approaches to adding more rigor, one is adding more logistic rigor, and the other is adding more cognitive rigor to classes. Could you talk a little bit about those?

Kevin: Sure. And so when we think about this idea of rigor in the way that we normally talk about as faculty members, I do think that there are these sorts of two camps that rigor falls into, I don’t think that we… and I’m speaking broadly here, and certainly implicating myself, in some of this… I don’t think we always do a great job specifying which one or the other we’re referring to. So it’s very easy for me as a faculty member to say, “I’m making a very rigorous class.” And maybe all of that is one type of this rigor as opposed to a balance. And so I think when we look at rigor, what it basically boils down to is there’s sort of two broad ways in which a course could be challenging, it could be difficult. One of those is what we talk about as faculty as the good stuff and what I call cognitive rigor, complex thinking, higher order thinking, the ability to critically interrogate information, the ability to step outside of one’s own perspective, all of the things that we know higher education should be doing. And then there’s the other kind. There’s, for lack of a better term, I call logistical rigor. And that’s where you see things like inflexible policies, volume of work, not necessarily difficult work, but so much of it that the sheer volume in itself is what makes the difficulty exist for students. The classic story, I keep saying it’s apocryphal, but when I tell this story at various workshops I do at other campuses, people always swear it happened to them. So I think it is real. But the apocryphal story of the big lecture class where the professor strolls out of the first day and says, “Look to your left, look to your right, only two of the three of you will be here by the end of the semester,” like that’s that sort of logistical rigor that I think we see a lot. The problem is, as I note in the article, we often mistake one for the other. We often say that our classes are rigorous. And we think in our faculty braids that they’re cognitively rigorous, but the way our students are experiencing them is actually through logistical rigor. And so if you look at some of the research, and I linked some of it in the article, what really surprised me as I dove into this, were the vastly different perceptions that students and faculty had about a rigorous class. There was an article that listed the top 10 features of a rigorous class according to students. The top five of those were what I would call logistical rigor, the number of pages that were assigned to be written during the semester, the reading load, the pace of the scale of work, none of the good cognitive rigor stuff came in until the bottom five on that student list, and the numbers there were significantly lower. And this is just one study, but there’s a pattern across when we look at student perceptions of rigorous courses, of difficult courses, it’s a pretty clear thread that students are experiencing difficulty as logistical rigor. And so when we as faculty say, “Well, we’re really after these cognitively rigorous courses and that’s what it’s all about.” Well, that’s not what our students are seeing, which leads me to wonder if that’s really what we’re doing. And my suspicion is, is that no, that we’re often creating these logistically rigorous course spaces, and thinking that it’s cognitively rigorous, and of course, those are two very different things.

Rebecca: Well, and I think sometimes that code word of rigor, and I intentionally use the word code here is that it’s often used to weed certain students out and then we wonder why particular disciplines aren’t diverse or don’t have new faces as a part of the fields and disciplines, as if having structure or support or scaffolding is somehow the antithesis of rigor.

Kevin: Right. And this is really the crux of it, and of course, everybody’s brains will first go to STEM courses because STEM fields have really been struggling with this. But as a humanities guy, there are humanities fields, including some sub-fields in my own discipline of history. I would argue philosophy wrestles with this as well, where rigor in this logistical sense is exactly as you put it, the sort of weeding out, its code for “Some of y’all should be here, and some of y’all shouldn’t, and by the end of the semester, we’re going to have that sorted.” And of course, is that what we want to be doing? Is this how we reproduce our disciplines? If your answer to that is “yes,” I would argue that you’re probably in the wrong line of work. So we need to be thinking, what is it that we’re actually doing? There’s a difference between saying “our uses of rigor are counterproductive” and “we should dumb everything down.” Those are two separate things and that’s not what I’m saying. But our uses of rigor are doing the very things that you point out, Rebecca, that we’re putting barriers in front of students, we’re closing off pathways and opportunities for them to engage in our discipline. And given this moment of where we’re at in higher education right now, I think that’s a horrible, horrible strategy. Rigor, it has become such a loaded concept, because it has become this stand in for weeding out or culling or all these other awful metaphors that we use in higher ed to talk about kind of thinning the herd, so to speak, and that language matters.

John: When you were talking about the difference in faculty and student perceptions of making courses more rigorous. It reminds me of the discussion that we often see about active learnin. When faculty are surveyed in terms of the extent to which they use active learning activities in the class and the proportion of time that they lecture. When students are surveyed on the same questions, we get a remarkably different picture, suggesting that faculty are doing a lot more lecturing, and a lot less active learning than they believe that they are. And it might be nice if we could get a little bit more dialogue going back and forth between students and faculty and getting perhaps more student feedback in general. But it does suggest that we’re seeing a disconnect between what students observe and what faculty think they’re doing in their classes.

Kevin: Right. And a lot of times will be talked about, “Well, I do X in my class,” like I know in my own case, there are a lot of occasions where what I say I’m doing is actually more aspirational than actual. I would love to be doing these things. And on a good day, these things are happening. And maybe they’re working. And I get that. There are some days in some classes where the stuff that we know is most effective and most desirable, just doesn’t work the way that we would hope or the way that we would want. But that doesn’t mean that we stop trying. I think there are plenty of opportunities in place for us to have that sort of dialogue you’re talking about with students to see: are the actual experiences of my students aligned with what I think they are? And this is why we do assessment. This is why we do, at least in a perfect world, student ratings of instruction, if this course was designed to get you from point A to point B, and I want to say that you got to point B, I need to be able to prove that. And I need to be able to describe what that experience was like for you as students. And so how do I bring student voice into this. So you could do informal midterm feedback, you cn do weekly reflection papers, you could do check ins with students. The faculty development world has, I’ve seen it referred to as the small group instructional diagnosis, which is a unwieldy term for a kind of guided reflective discussion for midterm feedback and input from students about how a course is going. I think there’s a lot of tools already there that, working together…. and this is the other hard part….working as colleagues, working outside of my old office and department, and with my faculty development people or with other academic support, can I bring these folks into the process where they could work with my students as well, and help me gather that data? Am I doing, in actuality, what I say that I’m doing? What is my students’ experience of this course? And is that in alignment with what I have designed the course to be?

Rebecca: We all hit barriers like time and things that cause us to slip into old habits occasionally. So those aspirational moves certainly occur for all of us. But I also think that that transparency piece about like, “Why are we doing this active learning thing?” or “Why are we slipping into this old habit that’s maybe not the most ideal?” …can actually be really healthy, because then students can also share that and have that dialogue going back and forth so that they know where they’re at in something and vice versa, like we know where we’re at in terms of the classroom.

Kevin: Well, and it’s an excellent model, too. I think modeling transparency with our students in any way that we can about the course design, about the content, about the ways in which we might be collectively engaging with that. All of that is to the good. We want students to understand that learning doesn’t just happen by accident. We want them to get into this place where they’re thinking metacognitively, and to me really the only effective way to do that is to have this sort of radical ethic of transparency. If a student says “Why are we doing x in this course?” If my syllabus has, here’s all the stuff that we’re going to do this semester, and I can’t come up with a good answer to that, that’s a problem. And so this helps, as you suggest, keep us in this place where we’re ensuring that what we’re doing is in alignment with our goals and our values as disciplinarians, in other words, as members of our discipline, as well as effective instructors and human beings. Does this stuff align with what my professed core values as an academic and as an educator are. The only way we’re able to do that, I think, is to be in this place of transparency to model what that looks like for our students.

John: One issue where the logistical question comes up is that during the pandemic, a lot of faculty relaxed deadlines, and sometimes dropped deadlines entirely. And that certainly provided students with the flexibility they needed. But one concern is that some students would end up getting further and further behind in the course. And there’s a lot of research that suggests that without some structure in terms of deadlines, and getting things done in reasonable periods, the quality of student learning tends to deteriorate. What sort of policies might give students some flexibility, but still make sure that they’re progressing through the course, so they can keep up with other activities that they’re supposed to be doing as the course progresses.

Kevin: And so this is the key issue. And so I think it’s important to establish that, when I suggest that rigor, at least as we sort of traditionally used it is actually failing us, is getting in the way of actual learning, I am not suggesting removing structure from a course. And I wish I could remember which of his writings it’s from but there’s this piece of one of the Paulo Freire books or essays that I’ve read, where he talks about what we would call learner-centered instruction. And he basically says if we’re in a rowboat, and I teach you to swim by throwing you overboard, that’s learner centered, but that’s not necessarily helping you learn how to swim in that moment. And his point is structure is a necessary part of what he would call a liberating pedagogy, that it’s not just throw people in and say, “Okay, go learn, you are the agents here.” And so I think it’s important to realize that you can do this work well and meaningfully only if there is a structure in place, but it has to be a structure that’s explicit, that’s decipherable for students. Back to your notion of the hidden curriculum, if it’s hidden, [LAUGHTER] and the students are running up against these sort of invisible barriers without being able to name what they are, that’s a problem. But if there’s structure in the course, where students are able to see “here’s what I’m accountable to, and here’s how I’m accountable to other students in the class,” then you’re in a place where you could do what we might call that desirable level of difficulty. And so I think there are ways to bring in structure and maybe more structure than what we had during the pandemic. Getting through what we got through was a victory in and of itself, and whatever we had to do to do it, we got through it at least relatively unscathed as higher education. I think that’s a really important win to acknowledge. But it doesn’t mean that we have to go all the way back the other way now. And so I’m a big fan of the sort of nuts and bolts level of policies that build in flexibility, but don’t get rid of structure entirely. And so Ellen Boucher wrote a great piece in The Chronicle back in 2016, and had the headline, “It’s Time to Ditch our Deadlines,” which is unfortunate, because that’s actually not what she argues. She advocates for a two-day grace period, no questions asked, for her students. And if you needed more time than that, then you had to have a conference with her and come up with a plan, like “Okay, I can’t get this paper to you on the due date. I’m going to take the two days.” While I need more than the two days we’re going to have a conference and as the instructor, I’m going to work with you and say “Here’s the game plan. Here’s your next step. Here’s what you’re going to be accountable for and when you’re going to be accountable for.” So I’m doing extensions, but I’m not just saying turn it in whenever. I’m not leaving students to figure out “Okay, what are my next steps? What are my next actions?” Because in the case of deadlines, we know that when students are failing to meet deadlines, as you mentioned, this stuff just snowballs, and it becomes worse, and then they just ghost us, because the whole thing has become so overwhelming that the avoidance reflex kicks in. And so something like Boucher suggests where right off the bat, here’s a two-day policy, if you need it, just tell me you’re taking it, I don’t need to hear about whatever stomach ailment you had, or I don’t need the graphic email describing your symptoms. Just tell me you’re taking the two days if you need more than that we got to talk first. And so that’s an example of a policy that has a structure there but still it explicitly packages in that type of flexibility. And I think that’s a good model for where we need to be, understanding that for different students life is happening in different ways. And yet, there’s still we can’t just say “Okay, turn things in whenever,” because as most of us design courses, stuff builds on each other, right? That’s the whole point of scaffolding and getting rid of deadlines entirely or not having that sort of structured accountability in place does prevent the type of things from happening that should be happening. And so I think finding ways to preserve structure but flexibility within that structure, which, I get is… as I listen to myself say that, part of me goes, “Well, that’s a really just kind of wishy-washy answer.” But I do think, in this case, that moderating it, there was a reason we got rid of so much structure during the pandemic, with this recognition that it was absolutely necessary for the way that everybody’s lives were unfolding and happening. That didn’t go away, like people’s lives still unfold and happen in very complex ways. And that’s true for our students and us. So we can’t just say, “Oh, we’re going to swing all the way back, 180 degrees to the other side, and have deadlines by God.” I just think that’s an incredibly counterproductive thing. And I think that the folks who have been trying that are the ones who’ve been seeing a lot of resistance, and not a lot of success in terms of their students meeting those things. And that’s where we hear some of this frustration that’s coming out in the discourse.

Rebecca: I think the other thing that sometimes rubs up a lot against rigor is this idea of relationships between students and other students and students and faculty in the classroom and that sense of belonging… somehow these are like diametrically opposed. It’s not like rigors over here and belonging is over here, and they can’t possibly happen in the same place.

Kevin: Yeah, and doesn’t that speak to what we’ve seen with the sort of debate such as it is over active learning? The conversation starts from an erroneous proposition that you could either do active learning or you could have a “real class,” like you could do this namby pamby arts and humanities, sit in a circle and sing Kumbaya and braid each other’s hair kind of stuff or you could do real learning and manly-man stuff. And I’m exaggerating, actually only slightly. [LAUGHTER] A lot of times the conversation about rigor and challenge starts from this erroneous sense of mutual exclusivity, that you can have a compassionate flexible pedagogy or you could be rigorous, but you cannot do both. When it actuality it’s and you have to have one to have the other. You cannot have a challenging learning experience where your students can actually meet those challenges if you don’t have a compassionate empathetic pedagogical space, because the whole point about rising to challenges is you can’t do it by yourself. This is what the Vygotski talks about the zone of proximal development, learning is social, you need other people around you, you need an instructor, you need classmates. Well, why is that? It’s because we help each other when it comes to the point of really challenging and pushing ourselves cognitively to get to that achievement of that goal, that desirably difficult goal. We cannot do that if students don’t feel that they belong in that space. We cannot ask students to take intellectual risks or to try something that they have never tried before, if they’re at a place where they don’t feel secure in doing so. Because we wouldn’t ask that of ourselves either, if we’re being honest. And so rather than posit: “you could be rigorous or you could be flexible and compassionate,” it’s “you can be flexible and compassionate and then you can be challenging.”

John: At Oswego this fall we’re going to be using for one of our reading groups, Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s book that you reference here, her newest book, which is Mind over Monsters, and you cite that basically as suggesting the importance of bringing both of those things together. And it’s an excellent book, by the way, which I would recommend to anyone interested in addressing some of these questions.

Kevin: Absolutely. It’s a brilliant book. And I think it’s a vital intervention in this very conversation that we’re having.

John: A term that you use in the book, which was a technical term I hadn’t quite seen used in this context, was that many faculty when they tried to introduce rigor, essentially are adding more “hard-assery”, I think was term that you uses rather than actually more cognitive challenge. Why is that happening? Why do people do this?,

Kevin: Yeah, and the phrase I use is performative hard-assery. [LAUGHTER]

John: Oh that;s right. Sorry, I forgot. [LAUGHTER]

Kevin: Well, I’m glad that that resonated, because I’m really proud of that phrase. But I really do think that that is where a lot of the rigor conversation is. My classes are hard, my students write, they read a bunch, they do all these things. And it’s like, “Do they? and what is the result of them doing those things?” It comes back to the student perception of rigor as the more pages I decide to read and write, students don’t talk about what they learned, and they talk about what they had to do. They don’t talk about what they became. They don’t talk about how it made them feel. They don’t talk about how they changed. They just talk about things they have to do. And I think that that’s a really important distinction when we think about the student experience in all of this. And I think it’s very easy for us to say, “Well, I’m doing my job because I’m assigning my students a ton of work, and it’s hard and I grade hard.” And again, I’m not saying we shouldn’t be challenging. I think we should absolutely be challenging. But how are we structuring those challenges? Am I giving my students a challenge just sheerly through volume. Is my class just kind of a death march through this enormous swamp land of content that’s just going past them a mile a minute, or Is it challenging in the sense that they are taking the time to be deliberative thinkers, to be critical consumers of information, because those two things look a lot different. And again, especially coming at this sort of not quite post-pandemic stage that we’re at, is a very real desire to bring some structure back, but thinking about bringing that structure back in terms of just assigning more stuff, because from our own graduate school experience, that’s how we structured our very lives. And so if we think about structure, and again, I’m saying we very intentionally here, that’s the first place our mind goes to. And so I brought back structure, because I’ve assigned a whole bunch more work. And now I also get to complain about how students aren’t doing the work, because I’ve built in this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, it makes me feel good, it makes me feel like I’m “doing my job,” but am I? Are students learning? Is this advancing learning, because chances are, it’s probably not,

Rebecca: As you’re describing these two scenarios, the marching through the marsh, for example, I’m thinking of the really long checklist that accompanies it. And then in this other environment, this luxurious amount of time to contemplate something and wrestle with something and think through it, and how there needs to be space around that sometimes, to really have the time to process and understand what it is that we’re trying to grapple with.

Kevin: On a micro level, we think about this as instructors all the time, when we think about trying to foster an effective discussion in class. We know that asking a good question is the essential piece of having a good discussion. If I ask a complex question that requires a fair amount of cognitive heavy lifting, I need to give my students time, I can’t expect my students to answer it right off the bat. If it’s a good question, there’s going to be some silence afterwards, as students think about and chew on it a little bit before they decide how they want to respond. And it’s true on a course level too. Are we providing space for our students to do this work, to do this processing? Or is it just more, more, more, more, more, faster, faster, faster, faster, in the name of rigor, in the name of structure, in the name of challenging, but it’s really kind of the cognitive equivalent of trying to drink from a fire hose, like what’s really happening there?

Rebecca: Sometimes not much. [LAUGHTER]

Kevin: I have actually stood in front of a fire hose, not willingly, but I’ve been hit by a fire hose. And I can tell you, it’s not pleasant, it hurts and you’re really wet and miserable afterwards. And I would argue that those are not the things [LAUGHTER] we want associated with learning spaces. And yet, this is, a lot of times, where we, and again, speaking broadly, where we kind of lay it…this sort of, we’re gonna fire hose everything out, and it’s up to the student. And I’m exaggerating slightly for effect, but again, not very much.

John: If the solution to the student disengagement is not dumping more work on students and having more students fail along the way, as many people seem to see it, what can we do to get students a bit more engaged with the class? Because that’s been a complaint. I’ve heard from a lot of people at many institutions in the last year or so.

Kevin: So I think there’s two things I would use to answer that question. And the first I would say, engagement’s not going to be 100% all the time. And if we are thinking that it was somehow that way, magically, before COVID, we’re deluding ourselves. And so we have to give ourselves permission to fall short in that category, not every student is going to be engaged in everything at every time, no matter what we try to do, because that’s the world we live in, that surrounds the spaces we’re in. And so let’s be realistic in what it is that we’re after, how do we engage students in a meaningful and at least most of the time kind of way? And that’s where I think we can do a lot. And so there’s a couple approaches that I think hold a lot of promise. One is we do have to be challenging, we do have to provide challenge, people like to meet challenges. If students think they know something already, they’re going to hear it and “Oh, I already know this, I’m already checking out.” So we have to put in this level of difficulty, of mystery, of complexity, but we have to provide support in helping them meet those sorts of challenges. And we have to be clear and transparent about how we’re providing that support. The idea of a safety net under the trapeze artists, the trapeze artists who’s doing incredibly complex and really, really difficult things that they’ve practiced a lot to do, but they’ve had a net underneath them, just in case it didn’t go well. And at a much lower risk sort of way, that’s what we’re doing. I’m asking you to do difficult things, things that you have probably not been asked to do before. You may fall short of the goal, but that’s okay, because here’s the supports underneath you. This is a space where it’s okay for that to happen. And so depending on the type of class and the discipline you’re in, that might look a little different. But when people talk about desirable difficulties, in other words, challenges that people can actually meet, even if it takes a lot of effort, but there is a solution. And again, I reference Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, a lot in this. It takes a while to get there, but you get there and that’s what the important part is. So how do we create teaching and learning spaces where the challenge is centered, but the ways in which students are being supported in meeting those challenges are also at the center. Right now we’re very good at centering challenges. I would argue we’re less proficient at centering those other things. And so how do we support students in meeting those challenges of what should be a demanding education? And so Cavanaugh calls it, in her book compassionate challenge. I suggest in the article that the question we should have as our litmus test is: does this advance learning? Does this thing I’m doing advance learning in the sense of what are the goals? What are the outcomes that we’ve established for the course? Those sort of transformations, those promises, to use Ken Bain’s words, that we’ve made to students? Are we getting there? Do you know how we’re getting there? Are you able to assess as a learner yourself what’s working in getting you there? Those are the sorts of things that need to be at the center of the teaching and learning experience. And if we’re just doing challenge for challenges sake, or that sort of performative hard-assery shtick, our students are not going to be interested in having that conversation with us or with themselves even, about what’s working for them in terms of the strategies they’re adopting, and the things that they’re doing to meet the challenges that they’re faced with on our course.

Rebecca: Thinking about procrastination in relationship to what we’ve been talking about. And sometimes procrastination reads as lack of motivation, or a lack of engagement. And sometimes the reason for the procrastination is that there isn’t the deadline, or there isn’t the structure or there isn’t the milestones to move you along. How do you see the relationship of procrastination to rigor and this idea of engagement?

Kevin: That’s a great question. Because I think if we err too much on the side of the so-called logistical rigor, or it’s like just really hard, inflexible policies and strict deadlines and this high volume of stuff, we’re actually creating the circumstances that procrastination will become an epidemic among students, because what we’re giving is an unrealistic amount of work to do in the time that’s allotted. And it’s very easy to get from there to just sheer avoidance, I can’t do this, I don’t see a tangible way through this, I cannot see myself getting through this gauntlet. So eff it, basically, is how that works. And so I’m going to do other things, whether I’m doing this consciously, or subconsciously, or some mixture of both. That’s like the perfect storm. When it’s all extrinsic motivation and when it’s all insurmountable barriers, at least from the perspective of the student, that’s like the perfect storm for avoidance. And I’m someone who personally struggles with this all the time. My avoidance reflex is keenly developed over the 50 years of my life. [LAUGHTER] And I do not do well with unstructured time. And so getting back to this question of how do we find that balance, I think structure is important, not an overwhelming or a suffocating amount of structure. But there needs to be something in place to help our students fit themselves and their work and their lives into the framework of the course. We need to be able to give them the tools to do that without pre-determining every outcome or stifling every option. But I think thinking about what are the causes of procrastination, what are the effects of procrastination, because one of the things that when folks talk about student disconnection is this phenomenon that we’re seeing more and more of students just kind of ghosting, just dropping out, like they were in class for six weeks, and now they’re gone. And I think a lot of that is things have built up to the point where they seem so overwhelming that there’s no realistic solution in place. And a lot of that is exacerbated by that cycle of procrastination. And so by the time we get to the point where the student is feeling so overwhelmed that they just want to leave everything, which they do, it’s way too late. So we have to be intervening in the earlier part of that process where it’s procrastination that is creating the conditions that this sort of overwhelming volume is going to grow out of a little bit down the road if we’re not able to intervene. So I think thinking about procrastination is the way you frame it in these very explicit and sort of fraught of mind terms is a really important part of all of this.

John: Since I’m at Duke, I’ll mention a study that Dan Ariely had done a while back where he worked with one of his colleagues at MIT at the time, and they were giving students writing assignments where they had to write three papers over the course of the semester. In one class, they had fixed deadlines for submitting these papers that were evenly spaced. In the other section of the course, they were given the option of setting their own deadlines, which could be at any time during the semester. If they chose, they could set them all at the end of the term. And what happened was that students who had either fixed deadlines or who set the deadlines evenly over time ended up performing better than the students who chose to put the deadlines at the end. And I should also note, there was a one-percentage point penalty for each day they were late. So it was a small penalty, but it was a non-trivial penalty. So the logical thing is to put all the deadlines at the end and then try to get them done evenly. But the people who had deadlines later did the work later and did lower quality work. So those deadlines can be important as long as there’s some sort of incentive structure with it. And I think that has helped encourage me to not drop deadlines entirely. Usually I allow some scores to be dropped or allow some deadlines to be flexible, but warn students that if they don’t meet the deadlines they’re going to have trouble with these in-class activities that are going to be done based on the things they were supposed to have done before they come to class. But it’s a challenge. And I haven’t found a good balance

Kevin: That speaks to exactly the type of balance that we’ve been talking about. We don’t have to choose between strict, rigid, inflexible deadlines, or no deadlines, or complete student set deadlines, like the Elen Boucher piece that I referenced earlier. Here’s the structure, here are the deadlines. And then here’s the wiggle room that comes along with them. And so your desire to sort of have the deadlines but to balance them with flexibility in your classes, and to have students understand, this is why you need to have these things completed, or at least aiming for this particular juncture, because you’re going to need it in the next phase of the course, etc. This is all part of what we talked about supporting students to meet these challenges, this is the type of support. Support could be encouraged through our course design, as well as the actions that we’re taking on a day-to-day basis. And so again, I want to be really clear that I think rigor as we’re using it kind of higher education wide, has outlived its usefulness as a word. It has too much baggage, it has been wielded in exclusionary, inequitable, and sometimes very horrible ways. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t talk about challenge. And so I think like Cavanaugh does, and like a lot of other folks who have landed on this idea of thinking about ways that we can challenge our students. And the way to do so is to create structured environments where the structure facilitates rather than suffocate students as they endeavor to meet those challenges.

John: And at our teaching center, we’ve given hundreds of workshops over the years, but never once have we advocated rigor, or even used the term rigor in our framework we always refer to challenge and the benefits of that. And you cited a Chronicle article that was the basis of a podcast episode with Sathy and Jack. And we’ll include a link to that in the show notes.

Kevin: The headline was, “It’s Time to Cancel the Word ‘Rigor’” and playing on everybody’s sort of obsession with the boogeyman of cancel culture. And I think that that got in the way a little bit of folks engaging with the very real truth of the article was that, as Rebecca alluded to earlier, rigor has been wielded rather than used it’s been wielded like a cudgel, it’s been a barrier, it’s been exclusionary. And when we talk about rigor now, I think everything has a history, this is my own discipline talking here, I don’t think rigor with the amount of baggage it’s carrying, I just don’t think it can be constructively used when we’re talking about challenging students. And because students have experienced rigor, defined that way and referred to with that word, to the point where there’s that kind of baggage with it too where it’s sort of the pedagogical equivalent of hazing, as opposed to anything else. It helps us as educators ask ourselves, are my challenges cognitive or just logistical? Are my challenges supported for students? Or am I just sort of asking them to close their eyes and jump off the cliff and trust that no bad things are happening. And it helps me as an instructor hold myself accountable to ensure that again, I’m not doing the things that I would rather avoid and that I am doing the things that I tell students I’m doing to help support their learning. In the tradition of first-year student essays everywhere, look at the Webster’s definition of rigor, it talks about things like extreme inflexibility and rigidity. There are connotations, you know, rigor is for corpses. So I think that it’s a concept that has no usefulness for the questions that we’re trying to answer and the knots that we’re trying to untie at this particular moment in higher ed.

Rebecca: There’s a lot to think about. Thanks. [LAUGHTER] So we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Kevin: Well, right now, I’ve actually thinking a lot about the course spaces in which some of these things that we’ve talked about play out all the time, and that’s the intro or survey courses. And I think the project that’s kicking around in my head right now, and I’m getting dangerously close to actually starting to write stuff, is thinking or rethinking the intro/survey course, sort of a critical interrogation. What are they supposed to be? What are they actually functioning as in reality? How large is the gap between those two things? And what are some ways in which people are creatively answering some of the problems that the survey course presents in terms of not just teaching but designing effective spaces as well as some of this comes out of my own field in history. We’re wrestling with again this death march through content. World history in two semesters, Plato to NATO in an academic year. Is that really what we’re after here? Or should we be doing something else? And so from my own discipline, I’ve developed an interest in thinking about this and thinking about the ways in which other fields and disciplines are wrestling with similar types of questions, which of course, then leads to the larger question of what is the point of these things? And are we doing the things that we say these courses should be doing? Because of that, thinking a lot about not just teaching and learning, but about first-year student success, about things like just and inclusive teaching, things like student-centered pedagogy, a lot of really interesting and fun things that are kind of swirling around. So the short answer, rather than that very long-winded one is I’ve researching survey and intro courses to see if there’s better ways that we might be doing it.

Rebecca: Sounds like a great project. Maybe you need a deadline so you get started on it. [LAUGHTER]

Kevin: Let’s not get carried away because I am going to take that two-day grace period, I can tell you that right now.

John: Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you.

Kevin: Well, thanks for having me back. It’s a real treat to be with you two again.

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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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295. Equity-Minded Teaching

As our student body diversifies, higher ed needs to respond and adapt. In this episode, Bryan Dewsbury and Mays Imad join us to discuss equity-minded strategies we can use to redesign or incrementally improve our courses. Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and the principal investigator of the Science Education and Society research program at Florida International University. Mays is an Associate Professor of Biology and Equity Pedagogy at Connecticut College and is a AAC&U Senior Fellow. Bryan and Mays are co-authors, with Flower Darby and Isis Artze-Vega, of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: As our student body diversifies, higher ed needs to respond and adapt. In this episode, we discuss equity-minded strategies we can use to redesign or incrementally improve our courses.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Bryan Dewsbury and Mays Imad. Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and the principal investigator of the Science Education and Society research program at Florida International University. Mays is an Associate Professor of Biology and Equity Pedagogy at Connecticut College and is a AAC&U Senior Fellow. Bryan and Mays are co-authors (with Flower Darby and Isis Artze-Vega), of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. Welcome Bryan and Mays.

Mays: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

John: Today’s teas are: …Bryan, Mays, are either of you drinking tea?

Mays: I am.

Bryan: I am not.

John: Mays, what tea are you drinking?

Mays: I am drinking chai masala, that I prepare the night before, and I wake up and it’s the first thing on my mind.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds amazing. I have an awake tea this morning, John.

John: And I have a ginger peach black tea today.

Bryan: So I’m it odd one out with a cup of black coffee.

John: That’s not uncommon. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: One of the most common teas we have.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. Before we discuss the book itself, could you tell us a little bit about your own pathway to this project?

Bryan: Mays, you want to go first?

Mays: Sure. So my career started at the community college. And in fact, I was a postdoctoral fellow when I started, a postdoctoral fellow studying the cellular mechanisms of learning, which is vast and complex. And as a graduate student, as a postdoctoral fellow, I had this growing understanding that learning can happen, and it can happen spectacularly well, provided the right environment is there. So when I began to teach at Pima Community College, I began to see how so many of my first-generation working students, coming, showing up, doing all what is expected of them, and having a really hard time academically. And I began to understand the notion of the system and the complexity of learning. So really, for me, it started as a recognition that I, as a teacher, as a fellow human being, have a moral imperative to address what is going on. The inequities that I was seeing are not an inherent self-evident part of the system. It’s by virtue of the human-made system, that I had a choice and a chance and an obligation to start to shift and address and interrogate and even transform. So that’s how I began and fast forward to a few years ago, when Isis reached out to me, it was something that very much spoke to my heart and I said, “Yes.”

Bryan: yeah, a little bit of a similar story, I guess. I mean, without maybe recounting my whole academic career, all of the authors on this guide are people with whom that I’ve worked with in different contexts. And there’s a sense in which projects like these tend to be a combination of conversations that you’ve been having for years. And obviously, there’s a plan, there was a strategy, we carved this out and really tried to think carefully about what would be the most impactful. We also recognize and appreciate all the other books and publications out there addressing inclusive teaching. So it’s not to replace any of those, it’s really to just kind of add to the conversation nationally. We are an interesting mix in that, in terms of our individual careers, and that Isis is a provost. I’m a research faculty, but also do a lot of faculty development. Mays will probably describe herself the same way and Flower Darby is nationally known a lot of times in the online space, but really her work expands to everything. So I bring that up to say that you probably will see a lot of that complexity come to bear in the way the book is written and the kind of things we try to think about, that our faculty would need to think about, when they’re designing an equity-minded classroom.

Rebecca: So it is nice to hear all your different backgrounds and thinking about the authorship of the book, because it does help us think about, as you mentioned, the complexities of how it was written and also just the complexities of the things that we need to be thinking about when we’re teaching in this space. Your book is divided into three sections. The first section addresses class design, the second addresses the day to day operations of the class, and the final section focuses on critical reflection at the end of the course. During course design, what are some of the most important factors that faculty should consider when trying to design an inclusive course?

Mays: I’ll share some of them and Bryan, please feel free to jump in and add. So one of the things that are critical is that we approach this work with intentionality and explicit intentionality that right from the get go, even from before the students get there that we design the course to have equity in mind. And one of the factors, when it comes to course design and curriculum, is that the course has to be relevant for the students. And what the research that we found is many students find that the materials are not relevant. Now, when I think about how the brain works and how we have limited energy, oftentimes, when I see my students struggling, and I try to dig deeper and try to see how I can engage them, I usually find things like they say things like, ‘I don’t know how this is going to make me a better person,’ or ‘I don’t know how this is relevant.’ And so the brain is going to disconnect, it’s going to focus on something that is more urgent, more relevant. So we talk about relevance being very important… to explicitly make connections between students’ lives and what is in the course. The second one is transparency, why we’re doing what we’re doing. And there is a lot of research about transparency and how there is more buy-in from the students when we articulate for them how things connect, and that it’s not just busy work. And then a third factor that we say it’s really important to consider when you’re designing your course, is rigor. And we talked about the research behind rigor, and we problematize rigor, and what is the definition of rigor, and so on. And here we’re talking about academic challenge. We owe it to our students to challenge them academically, so they could succeed in their next courses, and we understand that this is multifactorial, and that we have to also find the resources so they could succeed when we challenge them academically. And so those are some of the factors that we talk about to take into consideration before you even meet your students: who are the students? what matters to them? and why it is important to cultivate the space where, when we challenge them academically, they can succeed.

Bryan: The only thing I will add because you know, we both wrote the book. So [LAUGHTER] refer pages 25 to 50, for your question kind of thing. But the only thing I will add, because this phrase wasn’t used in the book. But this phrase comes from another wonderful book called Radical Equations by Robert Moses, a civil rights leader from the 60s. And there’s a phrase they use during that time, which is then applied, he then came to apply to the Algebra Project, which he founded, which is “Cast your bucket where you are.” And that really speaks to what Mays just mentioned about getting to know your students and your context, especially at an entry level, it almost sounds like provocative, radical advice. But a lot of these things that are really important for good course design have nothing to do with the content of the class. This is not us saying that the content doesn’t matter and they should just all be signing Kumbaya for 15 weeks. What this means is that teaching is a skill and a skill that involves the psychology of the individual, the social context, both in real time but also what they brought before they showed up to that classroom. And this whole conversation is taking place because of the years we’ve been ignoring that. So I really want to kind of center that. Because I think a lot of times when people ask that question, the first thing they hear is, “Well, how do I make respiration more exciting?” Well, yeah, we’ll get to that, but this is a human being that you’re trying to build a relationship and a connection with. And that needs to take front and center before you get to inspiring them with the really beautiful content.

John: The second part of your book deals with maintaining the class, with the ongoing running of the class. And one of the things you emphasize throughout is the importance of creating a sense of belonging. Could you each talk about some strategies that could be used to help create that sense of belonging within the classroom.

Bryan: I don’t want to run the risk of listing your audience to death here. So I want to offer what I’m about to say as maybe the thing that bubbles up to the surface to me as an instructor. There’s certainly a lot of things one can do to help students feel a sense of belonging. And the approach chosen might differ depending on the class that’s been taught in the institution. One of the classes that I teach most often is intro bio and it’s a really special class for me, because it’s it’s a privilege to teach that class. I’m grateful to have the chance to welcome students into a wonderful discipline and a way of seeing the world that’s relatively unique to that space. I also like the challenge of showing a lot of students who before may not feel like this is a place they belong or see themselves doing this 10, 15, 20 years in the future. I like the challenge of showing them that this is the real thing. You can be as much a biologist as anybody else, anybody in the book, anybody you’ve seen on TV, etc. But it is a very technical space. And any technical space kind of requires a slowly evolving comfort level [LAUGHTER] as you navigate through the technicalities of it. And I think that tends to be a place where some students and faculty get stuck into how you keep that door open and welcoming while navigating this environment that really requires a lot of time and attention on the cognitive challenge. So one thing, and it might sound simple, but how feedback is given really, really matters. Without saying my age here, but I certainly went to school at a time when it was your tool, just try harder, right? …just study harder. And any grade you got you there was this sort of assumption that any grade you got was just 100% due to whether you did try well or didn’t try well enough or knew this stuff or didn’t know it. There was no discussion of the way the teaching happened. There was no discussion of your actual approaches to studying. There was no discussion about what motivates you to even do this class in the first place. And now we know and we probably knew it then too, but we know how much all of that matters. So when a student sits in front of me and they have a C, it’s not just that “Well Mays, you need to do better than this.” It’s: “Tell me how you prepare for this moment. Tell me what is motivating you to be pre-med or to want to go to grad school.” And all of those things come to be in a conversation, the goal of which is for me to see you shine in the way that I know you can. How does it build a sense of belonging? It shows the student that I am not questioning if you can become a biologist, I’m actually assuming that. What I’m working on are things that are fixable. I’m working on strategy. I’m working on things that you can do something different and see a result. And so once you know I kind of have your back in that way, your effort then becomes different because it’s just a matter of specific things we can work on.

Mays: Yes, so thank you for that. Bryan. If I were to add to your beautiful answer, I would say take the time to find out what belonging means for your students, I think we often make assumptions about inclusion and belonging and what they want and what they don’t want. Of course, I start with the understanding that wanting to belong is a human need. We’re social beings, we want to connect and we want to belong, but on a day-to-day basis in my classes within my context, what does that mean and what it would look like that’s going to be different. And while I’m going to apply what I learned, and what the research says, I also want to take the time to ask students do you want to belong? And what makes you want to belong to an academic setting or a social group? And what are some of the things that make you want to belong? And what does that word mean for you? So I think starting with that is really important. It can be really informative to our practices.

Rebecca: I really related to what you were saying, Bryan, I teach in a really technical field as well. And that technical challenge can really discourage students if we don’t make those assumptions that they can indeed be in the field that they are studying. So thanks for sharing that as your top. I feel like that’s one of my top ideas, too. And I love, Mays, about thinking about our audience, and including our audience in the design. As a designer, I really gravitate towards those kinds of ideas. One of the things that you already kind of mentioned is this idea of connections and relevance. So what are some ways that faculty can help students connect course content to their lived experiences?

Mays: I think one of the things I asked them is I talk about how learning is very relational. We are relational, learning is relational, knowledge, when we co-create it, is very much relational. So one of the things I ask them is, “Why should you care about this lesson, this topic, this context? How does it relate to your life? How does it connect to your family? How does it impact the people you care about?” And throughout the semester this is a recurring set of questions that I ask. And in the beginning of the semester, I pause, and I model the answers. I care about this, because this is how it connects to the community, the people I care about, this is how it connects to something I feel passionate about. And then it becomes an exercise that they do regularly. We do this exercise at the beginning of the class of “What is your why? And what is your ‘why?’ beyond taking this class? Why is this important? And so we connect those many exercises or “Why should you care about the acid-based physiology” to that initial “why?” exercise?

Bryan: You don’t imply this in your question, Rebecca, but it does come up a lot about relevance and how it works. And I think one danger that I want to ask faculty members to avoid is the notion here is not that every aspect of the content has to tie back to something. You may fall into that trap if everything is not connected to something, but, you know, sometimes a cell is a cell is a cell kind of thing. But there are several things that do. For me, it’s actually less a case of connecting it to their lives, per se and more a case of communicating that human beings do science, human beings do the discipline. That, in and of itself, by definition, means that there’s a social component to how it’s practiced. It introduces the cultural context within which science is done and it introduces the bias that occurs with some scientific decisions, good, bad, in-between. It brings up a different conversation once you recognize that none of these things are really apolitical, values free. The second point is, to connect something to students’ lives, you have to first know student’s life so that this way you understand, it doesn’t feel patronizing or facetious. There has to be some authenticity there about Mays’ story about getting to know the students, I don’t think she just meant know them individually, but just also their broader context. When I taught in Rhode Island, it was important to know the local and the very ancient, but also more recent history of the state, of the city, of the neighborhoods the students came from. I knew the high schools that were big feeders. Those things made the relationship a lot more authentic, because the knowledge was there first. So I think once that all those precursors are present, honestly, the connection part is not that hard, it almost comes naturally. Because you just naturally want to teach in a way that builds a history of these beautiful people. And you kind of… I don’t want to say just is automatic because you are intentional… but it is so much, so much easier, and you have this desire to do it. I’ll just add one last thing, a lot of times with teaching, and I’m speaking now, as a faculty developer, here. I get good course design, I get you want to have learning outcomes, they’re going to be measurable, etc. But sometimes, even conversations like this can get stuck within the structure of what higher ed is, which is you get 120 credits and 15 weeks at a time you take a suite of classes, and those classes give you a grade and those grades average into a number, and then you become a 3.1. Student or a 4.0 student. We get it. We get how all of that stuff works. But I know Mays well enough to know that we have much more radical visions for what education is and what it can be. We come from the Freireian school of critical consciousness and preparing students to be civically engaged to have agency and power and to see themselves as agentic parts of a democratic experiment. So what’s driving all of this is who I want you to be, not necessarily getting your good grades in 15 weeks. So from that perspective, even simple things like group work, for example, it really is actually practicing deliberative democracy. Even things like how we talk about experimental design, they bring up other questions like whose voices are not at the table when you think about these questions, like whose perspectives are you not considering? Or who are you. So if you think about this a little bit more broadly, beyond like, I just want people to do well, in this really nice subject I have a PhD in, that you tap into the more socio-political aspect of education, which is a beautiful thing, I think, but it makes the connection to social life and just broader life in general easier to do.

John: One of the things that’s especially challenging is that we’ve always had students come in with very diverse prior backgrounds in terms of their training and what they know coming into our classes, but the experience of remote teaching during COVID resulted in much greater variations in their preparation. We want to create courses that are challenging for everyone. How can we do that in a way where we’re challenging the students with really strong preparation without losing the students who don’t have as much background? What types of support can we provide to make sure that all of our students are challenged, but also have the resources to be successful in our courses?

Bryan: We could just give everybody a trophy right? Now, that’s what they say this generation is. When I put on the intro bio hat again, and that’s a place where the differential readiness is really, really apart, I would have students who last science class you take, not bio, science class, was their first year of high school next to students who were in AP, went to private school or things like that. And that’s fine. It’s fine in the sense that I’m able to design for that. And I would say there’s kind of two things I’ll say to this point. Number one, you have to be able, as an instructor, to have things in place to accurately detect whose readiness might be further behind. And specifically, what areas of readiness that need addressing, and then have the tools in place to quickly respond to that. So a lot of times just my own history, it’s hard to study. A lot of times it’s confidence. Honestly, it’s fixed mindsets around who gets to do science and what counts as doing well in science and things like that. So the first month of that class is almost like a battle, that I generally win, I think, in convincing them that this is a place for them if we consider these specific things I’m trying to show you. So a lot of times, yeah, there’s class or whatever. But there’s a lot of times spent in office hours, which we actually call student hours, because it uses a smaller group. There’s a lot of time sneaking in conversations about: Have you tried this? Have you tried that? Emails that are sent to direct people, etc. Your students will come in and I’ll just say for now, maybe kind of fly in from the get go. There are other things that they can do to grow. So those are the students I might say: Have you thought about joining our research lab? I know it’s your first semester, but it’s a good time to get to know a professor more personally and see how science is done a professional way. A lot of times those students will come to student hours. And what I would do is I put them to work. I will say, “Mays, can you make sure this group of four understands glycolysis as well as you do,” and those students will typically go on to become my learning assistants in a future semester. So my point here is that everybody has a space to grow and has a direction and an amount that they can transform. The pedagogy is you being able to figure that out? And figuring out how to respond to what growth that is needed for that individual.

Mays: Thanks, Brian, I have a couple things to add. So number one, obviously, as I hear you, John ask the question, I think it’s complex. So yes, there are students that are going to come in that may not have the academic background, perhaps they come into my pathophysiology class not really knowing the cardiac output and the cardiovascular system as they should in their previous class. And then there are students that come in ready to be challenged. At the same time, there are students that are going to come in that are going to have perhaps subtle and not so visible skills that other students who maybe have the academic background are going to have. So it’s not just that I want to bring everyone up to speed academically, I want to also bring them up to speed when it comes to issues that really matters for citizens, their empathy, their non-academic problem solving, their collegiality, and so on. So there are a couple of things I do, I want to get to know who knows what. And I tell them that I’m very transparent why I do what I do. And I tell them that this is a way to give me feedback, so I could know how to maneuver forward. I also bring the tutors and the preceptors myself from my previous classes. And I rarely bring the ones who got A’s, I bring the students who came into the class, not quote, unquote, having the background. And then they picked up the background. And they succeeded. And they ended up with a solid B, and sometimes even a C, and I bring those students and we meet on a weekly basis. And so the culture of my class is very much we’re going to work together with the tutors. And then the third thing is I tell the students, we come from different backgrounds. And I use my story that when I started graduate school, my background was in philosophy, and all of a sudden, I am studying neuropharmacology. And many of my peers in graduate school were steps ahead of me. And I was trying to figure out just basic things in cellular neurophysiology, or cellular neuroscience. And so I talk about the notion of some of us have this background and not the other background as a way to celebrate the diversity. And I say the way I’m going to approach this is I am going to start slow, because I want to review for some of you and I want to bring up to speed others, those of you who are going to feel like this is slow, I want you to stick with me. And I want you to think about what’s coming ahead. And then sometimes I’m going to speed up and some of you are going to feel like this is so fast, I also want you to stick with me, I’m going to slow down. So it’s very much relational. I’m telling them what’s going on, I’m working with the tutors, they come and talk with me. At the beginning of the class, I do a lot of exercises where students answer on a form, it’s a one-item form: should I slow down or speed up. So I’m getting this real live feedback, slow down or speed up. I’m not learning anything new, this is overwhelming. And it gives me the opportunity to change and accommodate. No class or no session is going to be the same as the previous one. So those are some of my approaches. Again, be transparent with the student, get to know what they know. focus on not just what they perhaps don’t have academically, but what other assets they bring that perhaps the students that have the academic background don’t bring and celebrate those. Those are also important and constantly seek feedback from your audience.

John: And it sounds like using peers in the classroom to provide feedback and using group projects would be another way of leveraging the strength of all the students so that those who do have better strength in a topic can assist those who are still at an earlier stage of development, which benefits both types of individuals because by explaining it to other students, they’re going to reinforce their own learning and the students who have things explained to them by their peers are going to be able to connect to that in a way they don’t often if we were explaining it to them.

Rebecca: You just kind of talked a lot about some feedback loops that are necessary in learning. And one of the things that you advocate in your book is a process of critical reflection at the end of the term that relies on self examination and engagement with course data. Can you talk a little bit about that process and what data faculty might use to assist in this kind of reflection?

Bryan: I guess for me, I really would like the conversation about how we look at semesters that we teach, to move away from a hyper focus on whether we grade or not grade, or just assess learning. And I’m not saying that assessing learning is not important. But I would like to move away from that and broaden it to evaluating an experience. And that language matters. Because in the latter, by definition, when you’re doing any kind of forensic analysis of an experience, you naturally have to think about all the factors that contribute to whether that experience was successful, however its success is defined for that situation. And the factors include ourselves, the factors includes things we did well or didn’t do well. The factors include the physical environment of the classroom or the virtual environment. The factors include the support structures that were available for both the instructor and student to be their best selves. And so once the conversation broadens in that way, it just by definition necessitates some critical reflection. It really presents the class with that question wrong. It’s probably not them, it might be me. So just things like that. It gets us away from what I think is a little bit of a false dichotomy on that kind of issue. Should you put a ladder or should you not put a ladder, that is what it is, but this is what our section is really asking us to respect. If it’s a humanist process, then every human involved will have some questions to answer about how well it went or didn’t go.

Mays: So teaching, as I mentioned earlier, is very relational. And it’s a work in progress, as learning is. And so the feedback that we see from our students is critical to help us look at what we’re missing, look at assumptions we made, assumptions we didn’t make. It really helps us move forward in a kind, equitable, and liberatory way. So, first of all, we advocate for feedback throughout the semester. Talk with your students, listen to your students. It’s a co-creative process. And then the feedback that we seek at the end, we of course, problematize student evaluation. And we say that, on the one hand, there are so many biases and so many problems with how instructors are not evaluated equitably, especially instructors from racialized backgrounds and women instructors. And at the same time, the feedback is so important, because it is right now, it’s arguably the only source of information we get about students’ experience, not so much about their learning, but about their experience. And that’s really important. We do talk about ways to enhance the reflection, too. So we could get more in-depth information about students’ experiences. And we talk about this idea of reflection, why it is so important. Parker Palmer talks about how we teach who we are, and how our inner being is so critical in the teaching process. And when we reflect on even the most harsh evaluation, what we’re doing is trying to find the truth, find a truth within that, with the intention that this truth can help us grow as teachers, as instructors, as facilitators, as human beings. So it could help our future students. So those are some of the things we talked about that the reflection is so critical, and it’s been written about in bell hooks’ work and Paulo Freire’s work, and certainly Stephen Brookfield and Parker Palmer and Laura Rendon. And those are really important. I hope when I finish a class, that it’s not just my students who are changed, that I change as well, that it is a process where as bell hooks calls it, liberating mutuality, where the classroom, whether it’s online or in person becomes a space where both the instructor and the students are transformed by the end of that experience. So those are just some of the things we underscore in that section of the book.

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

Bryan: I will say what’s next, for my program in general, is we’ve been keeping our ears to the ground on the political landscape in the US, particularly around the kinds of things that we’ve been writing about over the past several years. And I think one thing the field needs more is we need to continue to have scholarship around these ideas and think critically about how to have education systems that allow everybody to thrive. But I think there also needs to be really well designed communication projects that message this and perhaps ways other than how academia typically messages this, which is through the research process. This is not trying to throw that process out of the water, but I think getting into more storytelling type projects, podcasting, narrative, op ed. So the short answer to you “what next” question is there’ll be more projects like that are coming down the pipeline, because we think that there’s a gap and a real need for that.

Mays: For me, it’s really bringing the wellbeing and mental health to the equity conversations. I think for so long we’ve done equity and inclusive work, kind of like in a vacuum without taking a holistic approach and that exclusion can have a profound impact on our sense of wellbeing or even mental health. I mean research shows just how systematic exclusion and microaggression can impact our cortisol level, for example. In my own work, I’ve been just saying how they intersect mental health and equity and inclusion and justice. And I want to be more intentional to, I guess, bring that to national conversations. What are you doing about mental health? I know you have this and that initiative for equity-minded education. Where does mental health fit in within that?

John: Well, thank you. Your book is a tremendous resource that can be really valuable in helping people build a more equitable classroom environment.

Mays: Thank you for having us.

Rebecca: We appreciate you joining us today.

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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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285. The First-Year Experience Movement

Far too many students enter college without sufficient preparation to successfully navigate the college environment. In this episode, John Gardner joins us to discuss how first-year experience courses have been developed and adopted at thousands of colleges globally to reduce equity gaps and improve student success.

John is the recipient of numerous awards for his innovative work on first-year student success programs. In 3 studies, he was listed as one of the 10 most noteworthy innovators in higher ed. John is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles related to college student transitions. With his wife, Betsy Barefoot, he is the co-author of a series of textbooks for first-year student success classes. He is also the founder of the annual Conference on The First-year Experience as well as the Gardner Institute, a nonprofit organization that has served more than 500 colleges and universities. John is the author of Launching the First-Year Experience Movement: The Founder’s Journey.

Show Notes

  • Barefoot, B. O., Gardner, J. N., Cutright, M., Morris, L. V., Schroeder, C. C., Siegel, M. J., … & Swing, R. L. (2010). Achieving and sustaining institutional excellence for the first year of college. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Felten, P., Gardner, J. N., Schroeder, C. C., Lambert, L. M., Barefoot, B. O., & Hrabowski, F. A. (2016). The undergraduate experience: Focusing institutions on what matters most. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Gardner, J. N., Barefoot, B. O., & Swing, R. L. (2001). Guidelines for Evaluating… The First-Year Experience at Two-Year Colleges.
  • Gardner, J. N., & Barefoot, B. O. (2011). Your college experience: Strategies for success. Macmillan.
  • Gardner, J. N., Barefoot, B. O., & Swing, R. L. (2001). Guidelines for Evaluating… The First-Year Experience at Four-Year Colleges.
  • Gardner, J. N., & Barefoot, B. O. (2017). Understanding writing transfer: Implications for transformative student learning in higher education. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Upcraft, M. L., Gardner, J. N., & Barefoot, B. O. (2005). Challenging and supporting the first-year student: A handbook for improving the first year of college (Vol. 254). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
  • Gardner, J. N. (2023). Launching the First-Year Experience Movement: The Founder’s Journey. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Annual Conference on the First-Year Experience.
  • Gardner Institute
  • David Brightman (LinkedIn)
  • Marietta College
  • Federal TRIO Programs
  • Office Hours with John Gardner podcast

Transcript

John K: Far too many students enter college without sufficient preparation to successfully navigate the college environment. In this episode, we examine how first-year experience courses have been developed and adopted at thousands of colleges globally to reduce equity gaps and improve student success.

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John K: 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 K: …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 K: Our guest today is John Gardner. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his innovative work on first-year student success programs. In 3 studies, he was listed as one of the 10 most noteworthy innovators in higher ed. John is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles related to college student transitions. With his wife, Betsy Barefoot, he is the co-author of a series of textbooks for first-year student success classes. He is also the founder of the annual Conference on The First-year Experience as well as the Gardner Institute, a nonprofit organization that has served more than 500 colleges and universities. John is also the author of Launching the First-Year Experience Movement: The Founder’s Journey, which we’ll be talking about here today.

Rebecca: Welcome, John.

John G: Thank you, folks. Glad to be here.

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

John G: I’m not able to drink… well, I guess I could, but recently, a physician told me I needed to stop drinking tea. There is some substance that is not good for the plumbing, and so I’ve switched to coffee, so I did have a cup of coffee before this, although I didn’t need the caffeine, but I’m already pretty alert. [LAUGHTER] But, if I were drinking tea, I’d be drinking a black tea, caffeinated, and I love tea.

Rebecca: That’s just my style. That’s so sad not to be able to drink it anymore.

John G: Well, I lived in Canada for five years as a child and I learned to do it up there. A lot of them have emulated their British Commonwealth forbearers and drank tea in the afternoons. And even as a middle school child in a Canadian school, we were served tea. So I really learned to like it.

Rebecca: No choice, no choice at all.

John K: And I mostly started switching to tea to cut back on caffeine because I was having so much of it. There was a bit less in tea than coffee and other things I was drinking. Today I’m drinking a ginger peach black tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: And John, I have your back. I have a fairly highly caffeinated black tea. It’s an English Afternoon. [LAUGHTER]

John K: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss Launching the First-Year Experience Movement. Could you talk a little bit about the motivation for writing this book?

John G: For one thing, I think it’s the only book I’ve done as a single co-author, it’s been my preference for my entire career always to partner with others in my writing, I just find it goes better and I like the sharing collaborative process. And I had done I think eight books previously with an editor that was the editor for this book. So he knew me very well. His name is David Brightman. And David’s the best editor for this kind of work I’ve ever encountered. And he was with Stylus Publishing but Stylus has just been sold to the Routledge Publishing house. But David had been talking to me about doing a book to try to really accomplish a number of things, but to tell the story of the launching of what’s now a global movement to pay more attention to first-year students, and also to connect that to other things that were going on in the world, and especially in the United States from the 1980s on and also to tell my own story and how I was prepared to do this kind of work even though I didn’t set out to do this at all. I didn’t set out initially to launch a global movement on behalf of a sector of students. But there were several developments in more recent years that I think influenced this and one was, the longer I’ve gone on in my career, and as the higher education community has become what our critics call “more woke,” I increasingly felt I was encountering, rather arbitrarily and irrespective of anything I might have said in any meeting, a level of hostility from people who were other than white males. And it was hostility that I think white men deserve for all the injustices we have wreaked on the American way of life. But I didn’t cause those. And I increasingly felt that there was a growing attitude that if you were white and male and especially privileged, that you just couldn’t understand the current needs of students the way you needed to, to really make a difference for them. And I began to feel more defensive, but generally, I didn’t acknowledge it publicly. So one of the things I wanted to do in this book was to argue that everyone needs to be involved in this movement, including privileged white men. And I wanted to lay out how I overcame all the blinders that I grew up with in a family of significant affluence, where the last thing my family would have wanted me to become, what some regard me as, which is an equity warrior. And by the time I was in my middle 20s, there wasn’t a cause I didn’t want to be part of. I had served in the armed forces during the Vietnam era, I had the coveted honorable discharge, which every young, healthy, able bodied American male like me wanted to have. And I was single and I had no debt and no dependents that I knew of, and there was just nothing I felt I couldn’t do. And so I became a really active civil rights warrior. And that cost me my first job. I was fired in my first job in higher education because of that, and that resolved me to be even more determined about how I pursue this. And so anyway, the book was about how did higher education change me? I want to use a word that some of us use trepidatiously, how did higher education transform me to be able to do this kind of work? Because I believe that higher education can and should transform far more than just me. And that speaks to the power of it. So this book is about the transformative power of higher education.

Rebecca: So in your book, Launching the First-Year Experience, you describe some of those challenges that you face as a first-year college student. Can you talk a little bit about how those experiences helped shape your future work?

John G: I went to a private liberal arts college in Ohio, Marietta College. I had a very traditional college experience, four years of residence, living on campus, did not work except for one brief period. Essentially, I was a non-employed student while I was in college during the regular part of the years. I never met a transfer student, I didn’t know they existed. there were only three persons that I can remember in my first-year class of about 500 students that were not white. So to say that I had a very traditional undergraduate experience was to understate the matter. And in the book that you’ve referenced, I devote the first four chapters to what happened to me as an undergraduate student starting in the first year, and the second year, the third year, and the fourth year, and it was a process of transformation. So in the first-year, I was a year younger than most of my peers, I was only 17. I did not want to go to college. It was an agreement I had made with my father, I was what we call now in contemporary higher ed language, I was a counter dependent adolescent, meaning I wanted to do the opposite of what adult authority figures wanted me to do. And my adult authority figure was my father. He’d attended an Ivy League institution, so that’s what I was supposed to do. And then I was supposed to go work in corporate America like he did and make a lot of money. It wasn’t that I was opposed to making money, but I didn’t want to work in corporate America. And I thought, one of the things I’d done as a high school kid was I had created a little landscaping service business, I had six other adolescent males who worked for me and I went out and got the jobs and then supervised them. And I loved working outdoors and having people satisfied by the work I did. I thought I could love doing this. And my father was horrified that I was earning a bit of money and I had this as a vocational aspiration. So I made a deal with him. And that is that he’d get off my back about going to college, if we could agree that I would go one year, and then I could quit. And so it really didn’t matter at that point where I wanted to go to college, as long as I didn’t go to college where he wanted me to go to college. So I went to college. And I got on academic probation pretty rapidly. I was 17, lonely, homesick, clinically depressed. The environment there was truly what we call sink or swim. And as a matter of fact, at the opening convocation, the President boasted about how if we look to the left and look to the right, we wouldn’t see the person sitting on either side of us four years later. And initially, I said, “Well, okay, when I graduate, I won’t see these two guys,” and then it dawned on me: “Wait a minute, both of them looked at me.” And I looked up at this man. He was proud of it. He was grinning. And what I later learned, of course, was that a benchmark of quality in the early 1960s… this was 1961… was the number of students you flunked out. That was a measure, that was a yardstick, and they were very good at it. And so therefore, there was no support services like we have today, no first-year experience, first-year college success course, no Learning Center, no tutoring. It was absolutely sink or swim. They did have advising. My first academic advisor told me, twice as a matter of fact, not once, but he told me twice, and I quote, “Mr. Gardner, you’re the stupidest kid I’ve ever advised.” And I thought about that…that guy’s probably advised hundreds of students, could I really be the stupidest? And that’s a bit far fetched. I wasn’t doing well, but anyway, maybe I better get another advisor. So I changed advisors. And that was one of the steps to my transformation. But my first semester grades were awful, and I got on academic probation. And of course, now, many institutions, when they put a student on probation, there’s a structure you have to comply with, or you complete the probationary period, but there was no structure. It was just a technical status. But somehow I managed to pull my performance up. And I thank the faculty for that, I finally discovered the four out of five faculty that second term that really got me engaged intellectually, but I had a student friend who befriended me, he adopted me. It was a student who was one year older, and of course confirmed that everything I’ve learned in the next 56 years in my career is that the greatest influence on students while they’re in college is the influence of other students. And now we try to deliberately get our high-performing students in positions where they can influence new students. That wasn’t done in Marietta at that time. But anyway, this student was taking a class with me, he was a year older, he was a sophomore by which the Greeks meant “wise fool.” And he said to me one day after class, “John, I noticed you’re not taking any notes.” And I said “So?” And he said, “Well, let me show you my notebook.” And it was like a fundamentalist opening any page of the sacred book, putting his finger down, And there was the revealed word. This guy had every word the professor had said. And so he showed me how one could predict the questions that you’d get on an exam by looking at the professorial notes. And he showed me how he could organize, or I could organize, my notes to make them coherent, and put headings and subheadings. And that I could predict the questions by observing what the professor said, repetitively, and therefore what he believed or she believed was important. By the way, it was almost always a he. I have done account fairly recently, in the 40 courses I took as an undergraduate, only three were taught by women, 37 to three, and one of the things I introspect around is, how would I be different if I had had more female faculty, that’s one of the ways I was cheated. I was disproportionately mentored by men. And we have made some progress in that regard. I can tell you a lot more first-year anecdotes, one I have in my book was and I should tell you this, other than having to wear freshman beanies… I burned mine… the most memorable thing that happened to me in my the first few weeks of college was something I didn’t do. And it was one of the most important decisions I ever made. It was a fraternity that rushed all the new males to try to find new members. And what they had been doing, apparently for years, was offering new young men like me, an all expenses paid trip to a brothel. And the brothel was about 90 miles up the Ohio River in Wheeling, West Virginia. And I was offered this experience. And while I was 17, I was interested in sex, I thought, “Do I really want to do this? No, I don’t.” And then I thought “Do I want to join a group that would put me in this position, and pay some women to service me? How denigrating. I don’t want anything to do with them.” And so I developed a real aversion to the whole so-called Greek letter social fraternity experience. And to fast forward to my junior year, that guy that influenced me in my sophomore year, once I started emulating his note taking my grades went up dramatically. A profound influence, and I never would have gotten through college, I don’t think, if that guy hadn’t taught me how to take notes. Marietta College today has an outstanding academic support service. And they don’t leave that to random. They want to teach the students how to do that. But anyway, this guy that saved me, we stayed in touch, he gave me a lot of advice on what courses to take. And he taught me to choose my courses by professor. That was more important than the subject, who I could really connect with, who would get in there and rattle my cage intellectually. So in my junior year, he persuaded me that I should join him in a campaign to persuade the college to abolish the fraternity system. And Don Quixote-like we challenged the fraternities to a public debate in the student union building to justify their existence in a liberal arts community. We took out ads in the student newspaper, we put up posters, and the day of the debate came around. And they taught me a very important lesson about politics. They taught me something about stonewalling, not a single one of them showed up. And there we were alone in the rented room in the student union building, and no students came, they all thought we were nuts, we were so counterculture. And I don’t know that I realized that then, but the perfect environment for somebody like me, who has some wild idea that may be really out of sync, the perfect place for me is the Academy. We are made for people like me. And so I went on and found other causes for the balance of my undergraduate career. I should say, parenthetically, that it’s been some years later in my career, that I’ve learned that Greek-affiliated males and females have significantly higher probability of graduation than non-affiliated undergraduate students, they give more money as alumni, and they learn, as my father told me I would learn. He wanted me to join a fraternity. And his reason was, and I quote, “Son, you join a fraternity, and you’ll learn how to run a company,” like he did. And that was not an aspiration. When I was at the University of South Carolina as a faculty member, a student affairs Dean came up to me one day and said, “John, I know you’re going to tell me no, but please listen to me, hear me out. I would like you to consider being a faculty advisor to a brand new fraternity.” I said, “Mark, you gotta be kidding. Why in the world would I do that?” He said, “Well, John, this group is different. They are not going to practice a white Christian membership drive, there will be no singing dirty songs in public and no hazing and no secret rituals. They’re going to be a different kind of fraternity. So would you at least meet with these guys once? They’re trying to organize this as a new fraternity” I thought “I gotta meet a group of guys like this” and he kept it up by saying that the President of this group is an art major. And I said “He’s got to be the only fraternity chair in the country who’s an art major. I got to meet him.” So I met with these guys, and they won me over and I agreed to become their faculty advisor and I did it for 16 years. And I learned from that, that it’s a lot easier to sit back and criticize the behaviors of undergraduate students, rather than trying to do something constructive with them. And so for 16 years, I did a lot of constructive things with them, and they were good for me too.

John K: The impact of fraternities and sororities are probably mostly because they form those connections that you were talking about. Those connections can be positive or negative, as in the case of some of the fraternity behavior you describe, like some of the hazing issues and so forth, which were pretty pervasive at that time.

John G: Well, they’re still very pervasive, many of them have been driven underground. But these are the elements of the traditions of American higher education that were created by white men in the late 18th century, early 19th century, and they endure, they’re powerful. The system was designed for people like me, white New England property owning Protestant males.

John K: So you mentioned that your first-year of college did not provide students with a lot of support in terms of how to learn effectively, how to take notes, and so forth. Did high schools provide much preparation for college at the time, or today for that matter?

John G: Well, I think there’s a difference, then I think they did a better job for white students anyway, particularly in school districts that had high tax bases, which is where I lived, I lived in one of the wealthiest communities in the United States, New Canaan, Connecticut, where I went to an outstanding high school. So yeah, I had great experience in critical thinking and reading and writing. As a matter of fact, one of the aspirations my father had for each of the three children was that each of us had a library, he wanted each child to have a library. And so I had bookshelves in my room, and I read a lot. And of course, he thought that we would read more if we didn’t have television, so he deliberately eschewed any television in the house. And when the last kid went to college, he bought three televisions. So yeah, I was well prepared intellectually for college, but I was not well prepared in terms of my maturity, or my attitudes. And this is important, I think, to the larger focus of your podcast series, because even the students that are well prepared can have developmental issues that impede their progress in college. And I was definitely structured for lack of success. And it had not been for especially a fellow student and the faculty that took me under their wing, I would never have made it and I owe them everything. And there’s a huge unpaid debt on my part. Years later, I became a trustee at my alma mater. I did that for twelve years, I’m still connected to alma mater, and working with them on several things. So yes, your question about my preparation had been outstanding, it was necessary but not sufficient, because the transition to college is not only an intellectual one, it’s a psychosocial, physical, spiritual, emotional process. And I wasn’t ready in many of those respects.

Rebecca: One of the things that you describe in your book is your military experience in the Air Force. And you indicated that that was more equitable than society as a whole. Can you tell us a little bit about that, and how that experience may have impacted the work that you’ve done moving forward?

John G: Well, I was a college student from undergraduate from 61 to 65. And during that period, the only good thing I ever heard about the military from my professors was praise for the veterans who had come to Marietta College after World War Two, those largely, in many cases entirely, men, they were so good. I couldn’t believe they were real, but the attitude about them was that the military was conservative, it was reactionary, pro war. I had negative attitudes about that whole class of people that do this, even though I was living in college in a town, Marietta, Ohio, that was founded by military veterans of the American Revolution, who were the recipients of the first largesse from the new government of the United States that didn’t have the currency to pay them. And so they gave them land grants. And this notion of the government owing something to the men and women who serve us in the military, it was a foundation for a tradition. And of course, after World War Two, you had over 12 million GIs who received the GI Bill, and I was in college, and I graduated in a terrible year to graduate from college, 1965, If you were male, and able bodied, and mentally competent, you were fodder for the American draft. And so young men like me who were moving towards graduation in the year 1965, we were strategizing about what we could do to keep out of the army because the buildup was occurring, and young men like me were being sent to die, and many of us were dying. And so what you did was you tried to get a so called deferment, and you could get a deferment for going to graduate school, for being married, for going to seminary, or working for a defense contractor. Those were the four criteria. And I had several women that I considered whether or not I could marry, not simultaneously, but I wisely decided I was not mature enough, that that would have been unjust of me to do that. But many of my classmates did exactly that. They married women to stay out of the military. And eventually, as the war went on, it wasn’t sufficient just to be married, then you had to have dependent children, and we even got to the point where they were drafting them with dependent children. But at the time I graduated, ‘65, if you were married, you would not have been drafted. I didn’t want to go to seminary, I was not a conventionally religious person. College had eradicated the Christianity I’d been grown up. I was skeptical, agnostic.So, I don’t want to become a minister. And I didn’t want to work for a defense contractor. My father was a very senior executive who managed 60 factories in the United States. And they produced war materials, he could have arranged for me like President Bush, 41, arranged for his son to stay out of the military, but I didn’t do that. So anyway, I went to graduate school, like I’d been an undergraduate, I liked so many things intellectually, I never chose a major. So I had gotten an interdisciplinary major, and I found there was a graduate field where I could do the same thing, it’s called American Studies, and I could study American literature, history, sociology, and I did that. And I thought, “Okay, I’m safe.” But Uncle Sam had a surprise for me. My second semester of graduate school, I got my draft notice, because in my draft jurisdiction in Connecticut, there were not enough unemployed, uneducated young men to draft. They started drafting college graduates in 1965, one of whom, a friend of mine, was killed in Vietnam. So I was about to be drafted, and so I decided I got to leverage my odds here. And so I opted to go into the Air Force, Air Force officer training, and the Air Force, in its infinite wisdom, made me something I had never been. They trained me as a psychiatric social worker, and assigned me to a base in South Carolina as one of two personnel in the base hospital psychiatric clinic. We have one psychiatrist and one social worker. Now the military, to specifically answer your question, was like going into another planet. Growing up in a very affluent white community, and nobody who didn’t look like me in college and graduate school, I had never been in an environment that was significantly racially integrated, or that was significantly integrated in terms of social class. In the military, it was very different. I was surrounded by people who weren’t like me, and I was living with them and serving with them. That had a huge impact on me. My first day on my base, my squadron commander called me in. He braced me at attention. I looked down over my glasses, and I saw that I was standing very properly alert in front of a black man. And I said, “Wow, this is going to be different, John. The only black people you’ve been around are people that work for your family. This man you work for.” And I had to do what he told me to do. And he gave me this homily. He said, “Gardner, although we’re in the Air Force, we’re an occupying army, and we’re occupying the state of South Carolina. This is only two and a half years after the Civil Rights Act, and we are going to do the best we can to transform South Carolina.” And I will tell you, when you went on the base, it was like going into another country. I left a totally segregated environment at the base gate, on the base, everything was racially integrated: drinking fountains, toilets, residential accommodation, schools, golf course, PX, movie theater, bowling alley, everything. And it was just transformative. And my commander also said to me, “Gardner, you’re the most educated person in the squadron other than the physicians.” And I didn’t know he was going somewhere with this and I said, “Yes, sir.” And he said, “Gardner, that means you’re going to do community service.” And I said, “Yes, sir. What is that?” Now, I would hope that nobody who listens to your podcast and who’s a higher educator or any kind of citizen will allow somebody to get to be 22 years old, and never have said to them, “You have some obligation to perform community service.” I didn’t know what that meant. So I told him, I said, “Sir, yes sir. But what is that, sir?” And he said, “Gardener, it’s exactly what I tell you. I own you. The Air Force owns you, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.” “Yes, sir.” He said, “And Gardner. In your case, community service is going to be teaching at night when you’re off duty in an on-base program we have for the University of South Carolina, for our active duty military personnel to earn college degrees while they’re in the Air Force.” “Yes, sir, But sir, I’ve never taught anything. I’m not prepared to do that.” “Gardner, the Air Force needs people like you to do this, you will do this.” “Okay.” Two weeks later, I started teaching my first class. And that was an epiphany. At the same time, my patients were overwhelmingly male. They were white, and they were black. And they all had something in common. They were all anxious because they were all going to Vietnam, not all of them because some of them were coming back from Vietnam because our base had a very specialized function that was only performed at this base. This base was responsible for the reconnaissance mission over Vietnam, the photography that was done to plot the bombing runs, and these were very specialized functions. And so we saw these troops before they went over and when they came back. And when they came back, of course, they were profoundly different. They all had VD and they had, oh my God, all kinds of types of dysfunctions that they didn’t have before they went over. I taught on the military base, I taught off the base at a rural regional campus at the University of South Carolina where all my students were mill workers, or children of mill workers. They were so different from me. And they had courage to be there, nobody in their family had ever been to college, but they were, in effect almost untouched previously by education, they were so deprived of the kind of education that I had had. But they had such enormous potential. And it was so exciting teaching these students. I just loved it. And I look forward to going to class, I was teaching five nights a week and Saturday mornings. I was really busy. And I found that college teaching and this is something we do with undergraduate students… We asked undergraduate students, can you think of anything that you really love to do that you could convert to a legal living and support yourself and your family, and that would have socially redeeming value, and maybe contribute to our country. And as I started teaching, I thought, I love to do four things. And the first, when you’re a college teacher, you get to talk, and they were paying me to talk… never thought that I could earn a living talking, I got a D and speech 101 in college. a Secondly, in order to talk, you have to have something to say you have to prepare to talk. So how do you prepare? You read. Oh, my God, they were paying me for reading, I love to read. And then you read and you wrote something. You had to have a script. And I never thought I could earn a living writing. And the fourth thing was helping people. I was talking, reading, writing, helping people, all together. And the other thing, talk about a benchmark, when I compared it to sex, I thought, God, this lasts a lot longer. I can do this with all kinds of people. There are no complications from this, well, maybe some but anyway, I want to do this for life. And so the Air Force was a laboratory in social justice. It was the military that expanded opportunity for black people in this country. It was the military that provided opportunities for women that they had never had before. I was in an environment where, for many people, what mattered was their competence: could they perform? …and that was revolutionary. So I got a hint of the fact that we could do better. And a very important lesson from this was, and I’ve carried this through my work as an educator, that what transformed South Carolina ultimately, to the extent it’s been transformed, and it’s backsliding right now, because of the Republican right, but it’s going to get over that, it’s going to join the United States again. But what transformed it was policy, law, the law changed in 1964, by mandating that based on the interpretation, previously, of the Supreme Court and then the enactment by Congress, there would be no discrimination in terms of employment and housing and health care and a number of other areas as a function of race and ethnicity. And unbeknownst to many Americans, at the same time, Congress slipped in gender in the middle of the night, that made it into the bill. And so now, we didn’t instantly desegregate South Carolina. but the process began. The South Carolina State Government fought desegregation of public education until 1970, it took 16 years to integrate the public schools. But when you get the policy right, policy sets parameters for people’s behaviors, and a lot of the work I do now with colleges and universities is trying to get the policies right, trying to get the rules that students operate under that get them either to do or not do certain things. And if you get them to do things, certain things, they’re going to be more successful. So the big takeaway lesson there was that, if you get the rules right, to create a really democratic, more egalitarian culture where everybody gets an opportunity, well, you can transform things. So the Air Force, it gave me my profession, I love the psychiatric social work, but I decided I didn’t want to do that as an occupation, and that I could take a lot that I learned from that into my work as an educator: how to talk to people, listen to people, coach people, advise people… the advice giving process, just be willing to listen to people and offer them different perspectives on their lives. That’s what college faculty do. There’s a long body of research now that students who interact with college faculty outside of class, they have qualitatively different kinds of experience in college. And I learned that that’s what I want to do.

John K: So after leaving the military, you moved into college teaching. And you mentioned already that you had some issues because of your advocacy for civil rights. Would you like to talk a little bit about that?

John G: Yeah, what I did was I was a faculty member at a state supported all female college in Rock Hill, South Carolina, what is now Winthrop University, and myself and another radical young professor, we decided that what this little town needs is a chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. So we formed a chapter of the ACLU and proceeded to sue several prominent members of the community for doing what we thought was violating the Constitution. The problem was, I wasn’t too careful about determining whom I might get ACLU attorneys to sue for us, and I ended up suing the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the college that employed me, because he was practicing racial discrimination, the assignment of employment duties and wages and other working conditions to members of a black church whose pastor came to us and asked if we would intervene so we sued this company and when the owner of the company found out who was behind that he contacted the president of the college and who promptly fired me. Now we don’t of course fire people usually promptly in the academy, we give them a notice of non-renewal. So I had the rest of the year to work out my appointment and I had to get another job. And at that point, thankfully, the folks at the University of South Carolina remembered me well, because of my adjunct teaching when I was in the Air Force. And so I got a job at the University of South Carolina where I worked for the next 30 years and rose from the rank of instructor to distinguished professor and had a wonderful career there and was treated with total respect for my academic freedom, and was never muzzled in any way. And I have nothing but respect and appreciation for that university for giving me the opportunities to do the national and global work which I’ve been doing ever since. So that’s what happened to me in that starting experience.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how the university 101 course was developed at USC?

John G: I better define that. University 101 is the University of South Carolina version of a type of course that has been in the American college curriculum since 1882… 1882. But it’s evolved and waxed and waned, and it had a resurrection in the 1970s, thanks to something the University of South Carolina did. And the course, University 101, has been replicated now at hundreds of institutions…1000s, actually… primarily in the United States, but in a number of other countries as well, Canada most notably but in other versions of what’s done in 101 with a number of nations, Europe and elsewhere. University 101 is a three credit hour letter graded course, where we introduce students to how to be a successful college student, we teach them the knowledge and the skills and the behaviors and the attitudes to be successful in college. Why did we do this? We did this because in May of 1970, the week that the United States invaded the sovereign nation of Cambodia, there was a protest on the university campus, over 1000 students demonstrated, the governor called out the National Guard, the South Carolina National Guard and tear gassed the students. They went into the building with the president, occupied his office. They set the building on fire. They made him sit in for 24 hours after the Fire Department put out the fire. And he emerged from this by saying something very profound in a press conference he held. He said that: “The students have given me an extended opportunity for reflection on the meaning of student behavior.” That’s the key. You look at students, you look at their behavior, and you say, “What do you learn from that? What do you learn about what students need and what kind of experiences are they having?” And what we learned was, they were furious. They were angry. And so the question institutionally became, instead of producing angry students, how might you produce happy campers? And so the President had this radical idea he said, It was like he was channeling me or I was channeling him. Because in the Air Force, I learned you could teach anybody any set of attitudes you want. You could teach him to hate, to kill, to help, to learn, to grow, to regress. What do you want to teach them to do? And he decided, What if we tried, at the University of South Carolina, to teach students to “love,” the active verb, love, love the University? How would you do that? If they loved the University, they wouldn’t riot anymore, and they would stay longer, and they would flourish, and they’d get degrees, and they would serve South Carolina, the public. So we set out to redesign the first year and I was one of 25 faculty and staff that this man called on the phone, had me paged, gave me, like I was back in the Air Force again, a direct order that I was to go to a workshop to learn how to humanize the University of South Carolina. And so we spent three hours an afternoon five afternoons a week for three weeks, this President and 25 faculty and student affairs staff, to create this concept of University 101. University 101 has just celebrated its 50th anniversary, going stronger than ever, even though, maybe and because of the fact that I have not been its director for 25 years. But I did become the director after the first two years. And it was the joy of my life to develop this experience, which has helped 1000s of students and significantly increased our success rates. So that’s what university 101 is.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what some of the most critical components of a successful first-year experience are?

John G: Yes, the most critical components are certain types of knowledge that you acquire, certain skills, and certain types of behaviors that you practice. One of the biggest enemies of first-year student success is making stupid decisions with all the freedom you get in college. So we focus a lot on this theme of freedom versus responsibility. Yes, we’re giving you a great deal of freedom to be here, it’s one of the gifts you get when you join a university or college family. The question is, what are you doing with your freedom, what kind of choices that you’re making? So we put a lot of emphasis on decision making. We also know that there are a set of core academic skills, like I didn’t have when I started, like note taking, that you can teach students. We know that if you engage in certain behaviors in college, you’re more likely to persist. If you participate in certain organizations, if you have what we call in American culture, a support group, if you can find a mentor, if you can find people who you admire and want to become like, and not only if you learn about what are the helping services and resources, but if you use them. So we’re trying to get students to engage in what we call assistance-seeking behavior. And that’s much harder to do for men than it is for women, which is one of the reasons that women persist and graduate at higher rates than men. And so there’s no question we know what to do to make students successful. We just, as an institution, have to have the will and the intentionality to do this. is deliberately. Hugely important is making students feel like they belong. This is a home for them, they fit, F-I-T, and there are lots of ways you can help students fit. And that’s what we try to do in what has become known as the first-year experience. That’s a succinct answer to your question.

John K: One of the things that I found interesting about your description of the University 101 class was the time spent in professional development, because I don’t think that’s very common for most college faculty, before teaching a course, that there was a lot of professional development. And it was interesting to see that happening so early. Could you talk to us a little bit about why that was put into the process.

John G: This all goes back to my President at the time, it was his vision. He was a native Mississippian, who had managed to get a scholarship to a high school completer, to go to, of all places, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he become an engineer, he went on from there, he became dean of engineering at Purdue. He came to the University of South Carolina in 1962, let it 12 years, presided over the peaceful integration of the university. We were one of the few southern universities that did not need federal marshals or troops or sheriff’s deputies to integrate. What he learned from this was that in the period, particularly after the Higher Education Act of 1965, when we were expanding higher education, creating larger and larger institutions, that these environments became less friendly to undergraduate students. And so what he learned was that we had to, “humanize” the university environment to be more accommodating to first-generation students who did not come from college-educated families. And the principal agents of humanization were the faculty because they had the most interaction with students. But in their graduate school preparation, that’s not what they’ve been taught to do. They’ve been produced as experts in a discipline, and they’ve not had any experiences and how to teach that discipline other than to emulate their mentors. And so his vision was, if you wanted to humanize a whole university environment, you had to change the behavior of the students. But to change the behavior of the students, you had to change the behavior of the faculty. So he used this course as an excuse to require the instructors who taught this course to go through a 45 hour professional development human relations training seminar, to get them to learn new ways to understand college students and learning principles and theory and more about psychosocial adjustment transitions and new communication and pedagogical strategies for undergraduate students. And his hope was, “Well, if you completed the professional development, you could use what you learned in the other things you did for students, you wouldn’t use them just in the University 101 course. So we established the finish, and that is alive and well 50 years later, nobody teaches this course without having gone through the training. And we’re still doing the training. And that is really the secret sauce to the success of this. And I can confidently predict over the next 50 years, we’re not going to give that up because we’ve seen what it can do. So the mission then of the University 101 program became really twofold: it was to develop students, but in order to develop the students we had to develop the faculty and staff who taught them in ways that they had not been developed in graduate school.

John K: One of the other things you talked about was how the success of the program was evaluated. Could you talk a little bit about what the results were in terms of the impact on student outcomes, in terms of student success?

John G: The founding president, to say the least, was rather controversial. And the university had tried to absorb 12 years of extraordinary change. And when he left the university to go to MIT to become their Executive VP for Research, we got an interim president for three years, and he made his hallmark for his interregnum, the idea of evaluating a number of the initiatives of his predecessor. We didn’t call that assessment then, but that’s exactly what it was. Matter of fact, the University of South Carolina has been really a forerunner and a pioneer in the assessment movement. So the new President, the first candidate he picked for evaluation was the President’s pet, and that was the University 101 course. And he announced this in the faculty senate meeting in September of 1974 and I was the brand new director of the course, and I was then untenured. So it was a shock to my system to know that what I had been asked to lead was about to be on the presidential evaluation chopping block. And so the university had to figure out how might you evaluate this. And they stipulated that I was not to do the evaluation because I was not objective about it, I was the leader of it. So what they did was they did a careful examination of what were the goals of the course. What were we telling students and their families and ourselves on the faculty and staff are the goals of the course and how might you measure the attainment of the goals? So we did a number of things. First of all, we developed a first time ever software adjustment in the university’s computing capacity to trace the proportion of first-year students who took University 101 to be able to compare them to students who didn’t take University 101, and we wanted to compare those two populations in terms of their predicted grade point averages, how well our algorithms were predicting they would do in the first-year of college versus how well they actually did. And we wanted to disaggregate the differences. We wanted to look at white students, black students, male students, female students, residential students, non-residential students, as many variables as we could think of to see who fared better than others. We also wanted to figure out what might the similarities and differences be between what students actually did, what were their behavioral choices in the first-year of college. And so we developed a survey that we administered in the required course for all students, first-year composition. University 101 was not a required course at that time, it was an elective. It’s still an elective, as a matter of fact, now it’s taken by about 85% of the first-year class, then less than 20. it was a very, very small population. There were about 275 students the first time we did it in 17 sections. But these questions we asked on the survey that we gave out in the freshman English class in which we did not tell the students who are taking the survey that the purpose of the survey was to evaluate the University 101 course, because we didn’t want there to be any kind of spillover halo effect. And so we asked them a whole set of questions about what did they know about the services that had been designed to help university students? And then we asked them which of these services had they used? And we asked them, what kind of groups had they joined? We asked them if they went to plays, concerts, lectures outside of class? We asked them about their relationships with their advisor. We asked them about the level of satisfaction and benefit they received in orientation. So we looked at all their answers, and we differentiated two populations. What did University 101 participants tell us? And what did the students tell us that hadn’t been in University 101, And, oh my God, we were shocked at the differences. The University 101 students were much more likely, not only to have known where to go get help, they actually went to get help. They were much more likely to have join groups. They’re more likely to have gone to extra co-curricular activities outside of class. And the biggest difference of all was that the students who elected to take this optional course, they had a lower predicted potential, meaning a lower predicted grade point average, which is a weighted factor of the high school rank in class and score on the SAT than students who didn’t take the course. In other words, the students who didn’t take the course were better prepared, and therefore we predicted they would have a higher grade point average and a higher persistence rate in the first year. What we found was exactly the opposite. The students with the lower predicted grade point average fared better and longer than the students with a higher predicted grade point average, they had higher retention rates. That was stunning, totally unanticipated. So of course, we wanted to know why… what explains this? Well, the explanations were in the things that students told us they were doing. And so we realized, if you do certain things for first-year students by design and not leaving it to chance, you’re more likely to get more of them to stay longer. One of the biggest takeaways of all was that the students who were initially predicting to do less well, it was a function of race and ethnicity. And we found that the gaps between how they were predicted to perform and how they actually performed were the greatest in the black students. And 50 years later, we’re still finding that the developmental changes and evolution of these students during, not only the first-year, but the undergraduate experience, that changes are greatest for the black students at the University of South Carolina. They are reporting the highest levels of involvement and engagement, which is astonishing, given the fact that it’s a predominantly white institution and the proportion of black students has been declining, I’m sad to say. And this is true of research universities all over the country where we are, perhaps unintentionally, I think some of us would say intentionally, re-segregating these organizations. So anyway, we learned a great deal about what you have to do to make first-year college students successful. And that body of research has been picked up and adopted by hundreds of other institutions now that do the same things we’re trying to do. They don’t always do them the same way. But they’ve got the same lessons. And so we know now what to do to make more students more successful in college, if we don’t leave it to chance.

John K: And by doing those things, you’re closing some of those equity gaps and providing more equitable rates of student success across all groups.

John G: Absolutely. We’re showing it can be done. There were pockets where we knew that before. As a matter of fact, when I learned about a campus before I visit a campus… I’ve been on 500 campuses, give or take, in my career… and generally the two highest performing groups on any campus are the honors population and, if the institution is so fortunate, students who participate in what are called TRIO programs, TRIO programs are provided by the federal government. There used to be three of them, hence, TRIO. There are now eight of them. But these are restricted to the criteria for eligibility, which has primarily revolved around Pell eligibility and financial means. And what we find is the lowest financial ability populations are doing as well as the honors populations who are disproportionately the more affluent middle, upper-middle class students. And why? …because in both those populations, they are getting levels of attention and support that the majority of students are not getting. So for any of us who cared to look, the TRIO programs were authorized in 1965. And we’ve known that if you do certain things for the students who are the least well advantaged, they are going to flourish. But we don’t do those things, many of us, for the majority of college students. Now at the University of South Carolina, that’s not true. We do all those things for all the students that want it. And most of them participate, about 85% of our first-year students have this, what we call, a First-Year Experience Program. So we know it can be done and American higher education just needs to be more intentional about doing that, has to have the will, the political will.

John K: And you mentioned visiting about 500 institutions, it sounds like this has spread quite a bit within the US and globally.

John G: It has, and the principal means for dissemination was a set of conferences that we began in 1982. And this is a really simple idea, but any of our listeners could do this. And when you really get immersed in something you’re doing in higher education, and you’re getting to know what students want and what they respond positively to, you look at that and you say, “What of this, could we tweak? What adjustment could we make? What are we not seeing that if we did something different, we could boost the outcomes.” And in my case, I looked at our higher ed enterprise in the early 80s and I thought if we wanted to learn more about first-year college students, and what colleges and universities were doing with them, and for them, how would you do that? There were no conferences, there was no literature base, no research, no journals, and I thought, “Damn, why don’t we just get people together to talk about this?” And so that was my rocket science idea. Why don’t we create a meeting to bring faculty academic administrators, state and Student Affairs people together? And we did such a meeting for the first time in 1982. And I want you to know that the state that sent the largest proportion of educators to that first national convening around the first-year experience was the state of New York. I thought, why was that the case? Well, hell, it snows up there, they want to get out of New York State in February to come down to South Carolina to see if we wear shoes in the winter and play golf, and I don’t care why they come down. As long as they come to the conference, they can do other things. Don’t blame them. And so we had a disproportionate representation of the colder climates in the United States when we started this work. We also had a significant contingent of Canadians who came to the initial meeting. Well, we’ve done 42 of these annual meetings since then, one a year, plus a lot of other meetings, and we founded a National Center at the University of South Carolina, it’s the National Resource Center for the first-year experience and students in transition. I founded that, actually, and left in 1999. But my successors have done a marvelous job with that. And when I left, I founded, with my wife, Betsy Barefoot, a new national organization that does not replicate the activities of the University of South Carolina. And we’re not offering a course, we don’t provide instruction, we’re not on a campus. But it is about focusing on the success of undergraduate students. Initially, your principal mechanism for espousing and disseminating this first-year experience concept was through a series of conferences. But, in addition, the other mechanism which has reached even more people is publishing, writing. In the higher ed community publishing is the currency of the realm. If you’re doing any legitimate work, you’ve got to write about it, and somebody’s got to want to read it, somebody’s got to publish it. And so my work, as it’s evolved, well actually long before I left University of South Carolina, has been significantly focused on publishing about this work, to get more people to read it and consider it, and decide how they could replicate it in their own fashion,

John K: With the success of these programs and with the training that’s often provided to faculty teaching them, those faculty often teach other classes, and the lessons learned in developing these classes and working with them have been spreading more widely throughout higher ed.

John G: Yeah, and that’s been documented. We wanted to know “Okay, you go through this training, you teach a first-year Seminar, do you use these pedagogies in any other context? Does it affect your attitudes towards students? Do you learn things that you wouldn’t have learned otherwise?” I’ll give you an example of that. This may sound prurient, but I think it’s appropriate. We, America, the world, we discovered the AIDS epidemic in 1981 and nobody was prepared for that. But the thoughtful institutions, particularly research universities said, “Well, what can we do about this? This is killing people. And part of it’s a medical challenge, but it’s also a behavioral one, and what can we do in the realm of preventive medicine?” And so we decided that a purpose of the first-year seminar is to sustain and extend life and to help people lead lives of different qualities. And so we thought, “Okay, here in the conservative South Carolina, the students are not getting sex education in the public school system. What are we going to do when they come to university?” They are at their… not peak, but their prime of sexual activity. They have a lot of freedom, privacy, curiosity, creativity, and they’re in good health, but they’re doing things that are very unhealthy. They’re making poor decisions, health wise. So we in effect had to become educators in preventive health medicine, which we did, and that was transformative for our work and so It meant that the people who were teaching this course had to learn more about sex than they had ever known in order to facilitate the discussion and the absorption of the information that we were getting from our medical school and our public health, all those experts that universities have, that we put together an educational intervention like this to literally save people’s lives. And so that’s another function of these courses. The basic purpose of higher education is to help people live longer and healthier, and more fulfilling lives. And you got to lay the foundation of that in the first year to help people stop making stupid decisions.

John K: And we know that sometimes first-year students do make stupid decisions, as we know, from our own experiences, as well as what we’ve observed.

John G: Absolutely, yeah.

John K: And I think that’s a good note to wrap up on. We always end with the question: What’s next?

John G: I started a year ago, what you’re doing, I started a podcast series, and it’s called Office Hours with John Gardner. And I’m interested in one primary question, which is innovation in higher education. How do some people become innovators and what sustains them and what’s the impact? And so I’m going to take these interviews that I’ve been doing, and I’m going to convert them into some kind of book and hopefully develop theory around higher education innovation. So that’s going to be my next writing project. But my next crusade is around graduate school education. We made a tremendous contribution starting in the early 80s by looking at the first-year student experience. I’m working with a small group of colleagues right now to figure out how to launch a national set of conversations around the graduate student experience. And I want to do that because we’re losing huge numbers of graduate students who fall out of the pipelines. But the public’s largely unaware of this, because the federal government does not make institutions report that. It’s not in the domain of public data. And most families are more interested, understandably so, can I get my kid into undergraduate school, get them through undergraduate school, but now for many of them, undergraduate education is not enough. And we know that the same inequities that operate in undergraduate school, they are present in graduate education. And so we got to get more people who don’t look like me, and for whom graduate education was not designed, to flourish in graduate education. And graduate education is the most traditional component of university college life. We are more likely to be doing that the same way we’ve been doing it for several centuries than anything else we do. And so I’d like to do that. Another project is I’m working with the Association of Governing Boards on a model to get college and university trustees working in more partnership with higher education campus based leaders to better understand and support student success efforts. I’m doing a lot of work around transfer. The transfer outcomes, and our student outcomes in our country are shameful, and I should have started much earlier in my career. On that, 80% of entering community college students indicate that their ultimate goal is to earn a baccalaureate degree and only about 14% of them do. Shocking, shocking failure rates that if we were a hospital we would be shut down. So I got lots of things to work on, lots of needs in the academy. The academy is a wonderful environment. I’m privileged to work in it with people like you who are trying to disseminate the ideas and experiences of others to help our fellow educators. And I thank you for your role in that.

John K: Thank you for all the work that you’ve done in building programs that allow more of our students to be successful.

Rebecca: I really appreciate the opportunity to learn from you, John, thanks for sharing your stories with us.

[MUSIC]

John K: 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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276. Teaching at its Best

New faculty often start their faculty roles without training in teaching. In this episode Linda Nilson and Todd Zakrajsek join us to talk about the evolving roles and expectations of faculty and explore the new edition of a classic teaching guide.

Now Director Emeritus, Linda was the Founding Director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of the Faculty Development Fellowship in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Linda and Todd are each individually the authors of many superb books on teaching and learning and now have jointly authored a new edition of a classic guide for faculty.

Shownotes

  • Zakrajsek, T. and Nilson, L. B. (2023). Teaching at its best: A research-based resource for college instructors. 5th edition. Jossey-Bass.
  • Nilson, L. B., & Goodson, L. A. (2021). Online teaching at its best: Merging instructional design with teaching and learning research. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Nilson, Linda (2021). Infusing Critical Thinking Into Your Course: A Concrete, Practical Guide. Stylus.
  • McKeachie, W. J. (1978). Teaching tips: A guidebook for the beginning college teacher. DC Heath.
  • POD
  • Betts, K., Miller, M., Tokuhama-Espinosa, T., Shewokis, P., Anderson, A., Borja, C., Galoyan, T., Delaney, B., Eigenauer, J., & Dekker, S. (2019). International report: Neuromyths and evidence-based practices in higher education. Online Learning Consortium: Newburyport, MA.’
  • Padlet
  • Jamboard
  • Eric Mazur
  • Dan Levy
  • Teaching with Zoom – Dan Levy – Tea for Teaching podcast – May 26, 2021

Transcript

John: New faculty often start their faculty roles without training in teaching. In this episode we talk about the evolving roles and expectations of faculty and explore the new edition of a classic teaching guide.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Linda Nilson and Todd Zakrajsek. Now Director Emeritus, Linda was the Founding Director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of the Faculty Development Fellowship in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Linda and Todd are each individually the authors of many superb books on teaching and learning and now jointly have authored another superb book. Welcome back, Linda and Todd.

Linda: Thank you very much.

Todd: Really appreciate the opportunity to be here.

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

Linda: I’m drinking a tea called water. It’s rather dull, but I enjoy it.

Rebecca: It’s very pure.

Linda: Yes, very pure. Very pure.

Rebecca: How about you Todd?

Todd: Oh, I’ve got myself a Lemon Detox because I’ve spent most of my day getting all toxed and now I’m getting detoxed. [LAUGHTER] Wait a minute, that sounds bad. [LAUGHTER] But that will be all right. [LAUGHTER]

John: Especially at Family Medicine.

Todd: Well, we can fix it. [LAUGHTER] In general, life is good.

John: I am drinking pineapple green tea.

Rebecca: Oh, that’s a new one for you, John.

John: I’ve had it before, just not recently.

Rebecca: Okay. I’m back to the very old favorite, English afternoon. Because I stopped by the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching and grabbed a cup before I came.

John: And we are recording together in the same room, which has been a fairly rare occurrence for the last several years. We’ve invited you here to discuss your joint endeavor on the fifth edition of Teaching at its Best: a Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, that Linda originally developed and now you’ve collaborated on this new edition. How did the collaboration on this edition come about?

Linda: Well, let me talk about that. Because it was pretty much my idea. Jossie-Bass contacted me and said “let’s put out a fifth edition” and I said “let’s not.” [LAUGHTER] I was not in the mood to do it. I’ve been retired six and a half years now and I’m loving it. I mean, I’m really loving it. And while retired, I was still writing the second edition of Online Teaching at its Best. And then I was writing a book, Infusing Critical Thinking Into Your Course, and I guess I had had it. I mean, I wanted to really make a change and I wanted to get specifically into working at an animal shelter. So I was all occupied with that. So I thought I remember Wilbert J. McKeachie, when he was doing Teaching Tips that he came to a certain point after I don’t know how many editions that he brought other people on to really do the revision work. And so I decided I’m going to do that. So Jossey-Bass said “Okay, fine.” They wanted three names. Okay, I gave him three names, but my first choice was Todd Zakrajsek, because 1. I knew he’d finish it. [LAUGHTER] I knew he’d finish it fast. I knew he do a great job. He knows the literature like the back of his hand, I wouldn’t have a worry in the world. And guess what? Todd accepted. Hip hip hurray. I was so happy. I couldn’t tell you.

Todd: Well, this is great because I said no when they asked me. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Like any smart person would, right? [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Well, I did end up doing it, of course. But the reason I said no was I knew that book very well and I know Linda very well. And I said, “There is no way. I don’t know anybody who can step in and pick this thing up. She knows so much about so much that it’s just not possible.” And they said, “But she really wants you to do this.” So I went back and forth a couple times and I finally decided to do it. And I will tell you, Linda, because I haven’t mentioned this to you. The first three chapters, I had to go back and redo those when I got done with it, because I was so scared of the first three chapters [LAUGHTER] that it was really rough. And then finally it’s like, okay, I hit my rhythm and I walked into it with impostor syndrome a little bit, and I finally caught my footing, but it’s a good book to start with.

Linda: Thank you. Thank you very much. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I know, the plot thickens, right? It becomes more interesting as you go from chapter to chapter, right. And before you know it, there’s a happy ending after all.

Rebecca: So Linda, Teaching at its Best has been around for a long time with a first edition published in 1998. Can you talk a little bit about how that first edition came about?

Linda: Yes, that was…I can’t believe… 1998. That’s 25 years ago. It’s almost scary how time flies. But anyway, the actual seed of the book came about in about 1994… 95. But I need to give you some background because I had been writing TA training books since like, the late 1970s when I was first given the task of putting together a TA training program. So back then, I was putting out weekly mimeos,[LAUGHTER] remember mimeograph machines. Some of you don’t know, what is she talking about? But anyway, that was technology then. But anyway, smetl great, though… it really did. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That’s the second time today someone has made a reference about the smell of those.

Linda: Yeah, oh yeah.

John: The dittos are what I remember having the stronger smell

Todd: The ditto did, yeah. yeah, and I’ll tell you before we move on, when I was a graduate student, we had a ditto machine. I just have to say this, Linda, because you liked the smell and all there.

Linda: Yeah, Yeah.

Todd: But they had a ditto machine. And below the ditto machine, I noticed that the floor tiles were kind of eaten away by the ditto fluid. [LAUGHTER] And then here’s the best part is that one day I was rooting around in the closet looking for something and I found the extra tiles in a box and the side of the box said “reinforced with long-lasting asbestos.” [LAUGHTER] So the ditto fluid was eating through asbestos lined tile, but that’s how strong that stuff is. So yeah, we all enjoyed the smell of that stuff back in the day..

Linda: Yeah, yeah. I guess it’s a good thing for all of us they invented something else, like copying machines. So anyway, so I started doing that at UCLA. And then that turned into like a booklet of sorts. And then I was at UC Riverside, and I was writing books there. And I sort of revised it every couple of years. And I was also writing these with my master teaching fellows. So we were doing that. And then I came to Vanderbilt, and I decided, well, I’m going to do this, pretty much on my own, I’ll get some help from my master teaching fellows. But anyway, it turned into an actual book. I mean, it turned into a happy monster. And I was very pleased with it. Well, along about 94-95, my husband recommended that I turn it into a regular book, and talk to a publisher about it. So anyway, I said, “Oh, great idea. Great idea and just sort of didn’t think about it much. Then in 1996, he died. And I thought, “Well, how am I going to pull myself through?” I bet it would be a great idea and a great tribute to him if I took Teaching at its Best, the Vanderbilt edition, and turned that into a general book. And I decided to do that and kept my mind off of bad things. And it turned into Teaching at its Best, the first edition. That’s why I dedicated the book to him, by the way, because it really was his inspiration that got me to do it. And so anyway, tribute to him. So that’s where the first edition came from. I mean, it really grew out of tragedy. But it’s been a comedy ever since, right? [LAUGHTER] So anyway, it’s been a wonderful thing.

John: And it’s been a great resource.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that it pulled you through, but then has pulled many teachers through. [LAUGHTER]

Linda: And I’ve gotten such feedback from faculty members who said, “I saved their lunch,” you know, if they were really in big trouble, and some of them said, “I was in big trouble with my teaching and you got me tenure.” Yeah, like, right. But anyway, the book helped a lot of people. And I guess maybe something in me when I first published this book said, “Gee it would really be great to be the next Wilbert McKeachie, right, which is a very pretentious thing to think. But then they wanted the second edition, I was thinking, “Hey, maybe I’m on the road to something.” And then there was a third, and then there was the fourth. And it didn’t get any easier to write the subsequent editions really, it was just a matter of keeping up with the literature. And so right now, I’m off into another corner of the world. So I just didn’t want to immerse myself in that again.

John: So that brings us to the question of what is new in the fifth edition?

Todd: Well, that’s my question. I’ve known Linda for the longest time. By the way, I do want to mention before we go on, I can’t remember, Linda, if it’s been that long ago, but it might have been the second edition. When at POD, I said, “You need to do a second edition of this book” …or second or third. But I was using the book. I mean, I learned so much from it. So for the new edition. Number one, of course, the research has been updated only because the research is always changing. And it had been a few years. So that’s number one. In terms of changing the book, though, we only have a leeway of about 10,000 words. Now, for those out there listening 10,000 words sounds like a lot of words until you’ve got a 200,000 word book, it was about 190. And they said, you can’t go over 200 Because the book just gets too big then. So it is 10,000 words longer than it was in fact, I think it’s 10,003 words longer. So it’s right in there. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So you snuck an extra 3 words in.

Todd: It could have been a squeeze to put three words in there. And it’s always hilarious because when they say there’s just a few too many words I just start hyphenating things so yeah, it kind of all works. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, just any words at all. So you can do “can you” as just a hyphenated word. It works. [LAUGHTER]K So is that terminology, the terminology does change and I find this fascinating. One of the things I love to write about books is learning. I mean, Linda, the same thing what as we write, we read a ton of stuff. And as we read stuff, we learn stuff. So this one in particular, for example, is that I grew up with PBL as problem based learning. And I had done workshops on it, I had worked on everything else, but I hadn’t looked at it for quite a while. And in this particular book, as I started looking at PBL, I couldn’t find anything on problem based learning. And it was fascinating because I was doing some digging, and then I called Claire Major, who was an early person who had a grant on problem based learning and everything I ran into was about 2002, it just started to drop off a little bit, and there was some, but it started to tail off. And when I talked to Claire, she says, “Oh, yeah, I used to do quite a bit about that, it was back around 2002-2003.” And now, and the reason I’m saying this is, every time I saw the letters PBL, it was project based learning. And project based learning sounds a lot like problem based learning, but they’re different concepts. And so anyway, going through and finding some of the terminology, so it was consistent with what’s being done right now has changed. There is now a chapter on inclusive teaching, because over the last three or four years, we finally realized that there’s a whole lot of individuals who haven’t been successful in higher education, partly because of the way we teach. And so I’ve been making an argument for a few years now that teaching and learning, the classroom situation has always really been based for fast-talking, risk-taking extroverts. And we’ve suddenly realized that if you’re not a fast-talking, risk-taking extrovert, you may not get a chance to participate, classroom and other things. So I looked at some different things with inclusive teaching. There’s a whole another chapter on that. And then just the language throughout, we talk a little differently now, just even over the last three or four years than we did five, six years ago, I was pretty surprised by that. But there’s some pretty significant changes in language. So the book has a slightly different tone in language, and those are the biggest changes. Oh, I should say, before we move on, one of the biggest other changes, and I did this one, Linda put a section in there that said learning styles had changed significantly from the previous edition. And so she had pointed out that there was no longer a section on learning styles. And I put the learning styles right back in there, I told Linda and she gasped just a little bit. And then I explained that I put it back in there, and then said exactly how terrible it was to basically teach according to learning styles, because it’s the myth that will not die. So that’s back in there.

Linda: People love it. I know. [LAUGHTER]

John: We have that issue all the time, students come in believing in them and say, “Well, I can’t learn from reading because I’m a visual learner.” And I say “Well, fortunately, you use your eyes to read,” and then I’ll get them some citations.

Todd: Well, I’ll tell you, and before we move on, these are the types of things we learned. I couldn’t figure out why the thing is so hard to die. What is it that’s really doing this because other myths we’ve been able to debunk. And part of the reason is licensing exams, when you are in pre-service and you want to become a teacher, the exams you take to become a teacher, a large portion of those exams, have learning styles questions on there. So you have to answer about visual learners and auditory learners and kinesthetic. And so until we get those out of teacher education programs, we’re teaching teachers to believe this. So anyway, there you go. Public service announcement. Be careful about meshing. And if you don’t know what meshing is, look it up and then stop it. [LAUGHTER]

John: We have had guests on the podcast who mentioned learning styles, and then we edit them out and explain to them later why we edit out any reference to that. And I think most of them were in education, either as instructors, or they’ve been working as secondary teachers. It is a pretty pervasive myth. In fact, Michelle Miller and Kristen Betts, together with some other people, did a survey. And that was the most commonly believed myth about teaching and learning. It was done through OLC a few years back, about three or four years ago. Yep,

Todd: Yeah, I saw that survey. Yes, it’s pretty amazing. Michelle’s an amazing person.

Rebecca: The experience of the pandemic has had a fairly large impact on how our classes are taught. Can you talk a little bit, Todd, about how this is reflected in this new edition?

Todd: Things have changed pretty significantly because of the pandemic. There’s a couple things going on. Again, the inclusive teaching and learning, which I’ve already commented on, is really different now. And it’s interesting, because it goes back to the 1960s. We’ve known that, for instance, African Americans tend to flunk at twice the rate of Caucasians, in large machine-scored multiple choice exams. So we know it’s not the teaching, and we know it’s not the grades, it has to be something else. And it turns out that it was you put students into groups and those differences start to disappear. So I mean, even more so the last couple of years, it’s a lot of engaged learning, active learning. I’m still going to pitch my stuff that I’ve been ranting and raving about for years. And there’s no data out there that says that lecturing is bad. What the data says is that if you add active and engaged learning to lecture, then you have much better outcomes than lecture alone. But we’re learning about those types of things in terms of active and engaged learning, how to pair it with and mix it with other strategies that work, looking at distance education in terms of systems and how we can use technology. So a quick example is I used to have a review session before exams. And oftentimes, it’s hard to find a place on campus to have that. And so you might be in a room off in one hall or the library or something. And if the exam was on Monday, I’d have the review session at like six o’clock, seven o’clock on a Sunday night. And there are students who couldn’t make it. I would simply say, you can get notes from someone else. And we’ve known for the longest time, if a student misses class, getting notes from somebody else doesn’t work. Well, now I do review sessions on Zoom, we don’t have to worry about finding a place to park, we don’t have to worry about some students finding babysitters, if they’re working, it’s recorded, so they get the exact same thing. So things like Zoom have really changed teaching in a sense that you can capture the essence in the experience of teaching and use it for others, and it has helped with some equity issues. You can’t do it all the time. And teaching over Zoom is different than face to face. But there are now ways of using different technologies and using different modalities to help to teach in ways that were not really used before the pandemic.

John: Speaking of that, during the pandemic, there was a period of rapid expansion in both the variety of edtech tools available and in terms of teaching modalities themselves. In the description of your book, it indicates that you address useful educational technology and what is a waste of time? Could you give us an example of both some useful technologies that could be used and some that are not so useful? And also perhaps a reaction to the spread of bichronous and HyFlex instruction?

Linda: Yeah, I’ll take this one. And I’m drawing a lot of stuff from another book that I co-authored, with Ludwika Goodman. We were writing about Online Teaching at its Best, okay. And she was an instructional designer. And I came from teaching and learning and we put our literature’s together. And we were talking about modalities a great deal, especially in the second edition with the pandemic. Well, one thing I found out, not only from reading, but also from watching this happen was that this Hyflex or bichronous, whatever you want to call it, is a bust, if there ever was a modality, that’s a bad idea it’s that one, even though administrators love it because students can choose whether to come to class and do the things they would do in class, or to attend class remotely? Well, yeah, it sounds like “oh, yeah, that could be good.” But the technological problems, and then the social problems, especially the in-class social problems are enormous. And in-class social problems, like small group work, how do you hear what’s going on in the classroom over this low roar of small groups? Okay, so how can you help? How can the students that are learning remotely, what can they do? Now, the way this was invented, by the way, was for a small graduate class, and then okay, like, makes sense, because you’re only dealing with six students in this room and six students who are remote. But other than that, it’s so bad, the logistics, the sound logistics, the coordination that the instructor has to maintain, the attempt at being fair to both groups, at bringing in both groups, when the groups can’t even hear each other well. Now, if we had Hollywood level equipment in our classrooms, we might be able to make this work a little better, but we don’t, and we’re never going to have that. So there are just a lot of technological and social reasons why HyFlex, that’s what I called it in Online Teaching at its Best, what it was called at the time is a complete bust. Now, not to be confused with hybrid or blended learning, which we found has worked exceedingly well. So bringing in some technology, but into a face-to-face environment and that being the base of the class. Now, remote’s nice, but you might not want to do remote all the time for all things. It’s not quite the next best thing to being there. But it’s something and as long as you don’t just stand there and stare at the camera and lecture for an hour. You’ll get complaints about that quickly. And particularly with students today when they really need to be actively involved, actively engaged. So yeah, sure, fine, talk for three minutes, maybe even push it for five, but then give them something to do and you really, really must in remote because otherwise, you’re just some talking head on television.

Todd: I agree completely. In fact, it was funny because I happen to have a digital copy of the book here. And so I typed in a ctrl F and I typed in HyFlex and there’s one comment to the preface that said there’s many different formats out there and then I will tell the listeners, if you’re expecting to learn about HyFlex, the word never shows up again in the book. [LAUGHTER] So, it’s not in there. I mean, you look at the literature that’s out there. And I think it’s fair to say that maybe there are people who can do it. I haven’t really seen it done well and I think Linda’s saying she hasn’t either. And it’s so difficult, especially for a book like this. That’s not what we’re all about. I mean, again, if it even works well, which I’d love to hear that it would be a very advanced book and that’s not what this is. So we do have a lot in there about technology in terms of edtech tools, though. There are those in there, I would just say real quickly, for instance, Padlet’s one of my favorites, I’ll throw that out there. I like Padlet a lot. But there are tools out there, if you want to do a gallery walk, which for instance, if you happen to be in a face-to-face course, you’d set up maybe four stations with big sheets of paper, you put your students into groups, and then they walk from sheet of paper to sheet of paper, and they move around the room. And they can do what’s called a gallery walk. You can do the same thing online with a jamboard, you can set up jamboards so that there’s different pages, and then each group is on a page. And then you just say it’s time to shift pages, they could shift pages. So I’ve done gallery walks, and it’s worked well. I’ve used Padlet for brainstorming. And one of the things I love about Padlet, I’ll have to say is if you are doing some digital teaching in a situation, you can watch what each group is developing on the page for all groups at the same time. I can’t hear all groups at the same time when I walk around the room. So there are certainly some technologies coming out that can really do things well. There’s also things that don’t work very well, though. And I think one of the things you want to keep in mind is just learning theory. Does the technology you’re using advance students, potentially, through learning theory? Does it help with repetition? Does it help with attention? Linda was just mentioning attention, if you lecture too long, you lose their attention. If you do something ridiculously simple or not… I was gonna say stupid, but that sounds rude. But if we do something as a small group that makes no sense, you don’t get their attention either. So using clickers, I have to say, I watched a faculty member one time because they were touted as a person who was very engaging. And this is at a medical school, so I really wanted to see this. And the person used clickers, but used it in a way that asked the students a question, they responded, and the instructor looked up at the board and said, “Here’s how you responded, let’s move on.” And then moved on to the next thing. And about five minutes later gave another question said, “How do you respond?” and they clicked the clicker, and then they moved on again. That had no value at all, and in fact, there was no actual interaction there. So afterwards, I say, can’t you just ask a rhetorical question and just move on? We got to be careful not to use technology just because it’s being used, it should advance the learning process.

John: However, clickers can be effective if it’s combined with peer discussion and some feedback and some just-in-time teaching. If it’s just used to get responses that are ignored, it really doesn’t align with any evidence-based practice or anything we know about teaching and learning. But those per discussions can be useful and there’s a lot of research that show that does result in longer-term knowledge retention when it’s used correctly, but often it’s not.

Todd: Right. And I think that’s a really good point. I’m glad you said that, because Eric Mazur, and his concept tests, for a large extent, that’s where active and engaged learning really took off. And that is a clicker questions. And they can be used as great tools. But again, if you’re using it for the right reason, which is what you just said, My comment is, there’s technology out there, that is a waste of time, and not a good thing to have, because it’s just not being used in a way that’s conducive to learning. So good point, that’s fair.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about who the audience of the book is?

Linda: Sure. It’s actually for anybody who teaches students older than children, I suppose, because it isn’t really designed for teaching children. But other than that, it’s really for people who teach but don’t have the time to read a book. The nice thing about Teaching at its Best is you can go to the table of contents, you go to the index, you could find exactly what you need for your next class. And it’s very oriented towards how to, so it could be for beginners or for experienced people who simply haven’t tried something specific before, or want a twist on it, or just want some inspiration. Because there there are a lot of different teaching techniques in there. And they’re all oriented towards student engagement, every single one of them. But I wanted to comment too, on just how the job of instructor or professor has changed over the past, I don’t know, 40 years, I suppose. I know when I started teaching it was a completely different job. And I started teaching in 1975, when I was 12, of course, but no and I was young to start teaching because I was 25 and there I was 180 students in front of me. So oops, my goodness, what have I done? But that’s exactly what I wanted to do. But you’d go in there, you’d lecture and you’d walk out. You were in complete control of everything. Like, you might throw out a question and you might get a discussion going. But it wasn’t considered to be essential. In fact, there were two teaching techniques back then: there was lecture, and there was discussion. And nobody knew how to do discussion. Now, I had to find out a few things about it when I was doing TA training, because TAs were supposed to be running discussions. But there wasn’t a lot out there. Thank God for Wilbert McKeachie’s book Teaching Tips, because that was about the only source out there you could go to. So anyway, but now the job, I mean, oh, it’s mind boggling what faculty are now expected to do. And they are supposed to, like, learning outcomes. Okay, I love learning outcomes. They’re wonderful. But I didn’t have to do that when I started, I just had to talk about my subject, which I dearly loved. And so, that was nothing. But you’ve got learning outcomes. So you’ve got to be like, a course designer, you have to deal with a student’s mental health problems, right? It’s part of the job, and you’re expected to respond to them. You’re supposed to give them career counseling in careers that you might not know much about, and possibly for good reason, because you’re in your own career. It’s so time consuming, not to mention fair use, oh, yes, fair use has changed, fair use has changed radically. And when you’re dealing with anything online, the rules are totally different. And you’re highly restricted as to what you can use, what you could do. When you’re in a face-to-face classroom, it’s a little bit easier. So yeah, so you got to be a copyright lawyer to stay out of trouble. And then you get involved in accreditation, you get involved in that kind of assessment. So you have to all of a sudden be totally involved in what your program is doing, what your major is doing, where it’s headed. There’s just too much to do. And there are more and more committees and oh, there’s a lot of time wasted in committees. Of course, you’re supposed to publish at the same time and make presentations at conferences. It was like that back then, too. But now, the expectations are higher, and it’s on top of more time in teaching, and more courses. I was teaching four courses a year, and you can’t find that kind of job anymore.

Rebecca: So Linda, you’re saying the animal shelter is going really well now?

Linda: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Todd: That’s hilarious. Well, I want to point out too, and I think Linda’s said it very, very well is that we are expected to do things we never had to use before. Never worried about before. And I love the fair use is great, because when I first started teaching, and I’ve been teaching for 36 years, when I first started teaching, you’d videotape something off TV and show it in class and then put it on the shelf. And I knew people who showed the same video for 10 years. Right now you better be careful about showing the same video for 10 years. But these are things we need to know. I would say also, by the way, this is a really good book for administrators, anybody who would like to give guidance to faculty members, or better understand teaching and learning so that when promotion and tenure comes along, you get a sense of this. And so if you’re saying to the faculty, they should use a variety of teaching strategies. It’s not a bad idea to know a variety of teaching strategies. And so I think it’s good for administrators as well, and graduate students. But I want to take a second and tell you, one of the reviews of the book, I guess, came in just yesterday or the day before from Dan Levy. He’s a senior lecturer at Harvard University. And what he put was Teaching at it’s Best is an absolute gem. Whether you are new to teaching in higher education, or have been doing it for a while, you will find this book’s evidence-based advice on a wide range of teaching issues to be very helpful. The style is engaging and the breadth is impressive. If you want to teach at your best you should read Teaching at its Best. And I love what he put in there because it doesn’t matter if you’re a new teacher or you’ve been doing it for a while, this book’s got a lot of stuff in it.

John: And Dan has been a guest on our podcast, and he’s also an economist, which is another thing in his favor. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: That is good.

John: I do want to comment on lenders observation about how teaching has changed because I came in at a very similar type of experience. I was told by the chair of the department not to waste a lot of time on teaching and to focus primarily on research because that’s what’s most important, and that’s the only thing that’s really ultimately valued here or elsewhere in the job market. But then what happened is a few people started reading the literature on how we learn And then they started writing these books about it. [LAUGHTER] And these books encouraged us to do things like retrieval practice and low-stakes tests, and to provide lots of feedback to students. So those people…[LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I don’t know any of them.

John: …but as a result of that many people started changing the way they teach in response to this. So some of it is you brought this on to all of us by sharing… [LAUGHTER]

Linda: I apologize.

Todd: Sorry about that.

Linda: I apologize.

Todd: We apologize and you know, I will say too is, so yeah, sorry. Sorry about doing that. But I’m glad you said that.

Linda: We made the job harder didn’t we?

Todd: We did, but you know to just be fair for Linda and I as well as I still remember a faculty member calling me, It must have been about 20 years ago, and I just started doing a little bit of Faculty Development, she was crying, she had given her first assignment in terms of a paper. And she said, I’m sitting here with a stack of papers, and I don’t know how to grade them. And it got me thinking a little bit, how many of the aspects of the job that we’re required to do, were we trained to do? And that’s the stuff that Linda was mentioning as well, is nobody taught me. I’m an industrial psychologist. And so nobody taught me the strategies for delivering information to a group of 200 people. Nobody taught me how to grade essay tests. Nobody taught me how to grade presentations, I didn’t know about fair use and how I could use things. I mean, you go through and list all of the things that you’re required to do. And then look at all the things you were trained to do. And this is tough. And that changed. So I have one quick one I’ll mention is I was hired as an adjunct faculty member before I got my first tenure-track job. And I was teaching 4-4. So I had four classes in the fall, four classes in the spring. And about halfway through the spring, I ran into the department chair, and I was interested to see if I was going to be able to come back and I said, “Hey, Mike, how am I doing?” And this was at Central Michigan University, a pretty good sized school. He said, “You were fantastic.” And I said, “Excellent. What have you heard?” He said, “absolutely nothing.” So when it comes to teaching, what I learned was: research, you had to do well, and teaching, you had to not do terribly. And that is what you were mentioning has changed is now you’re kind of expected to do teaching as well.

Rebecca: And there’s a lot more research in the area now too. So sometimes it’s hard to keep up on it. So books like this can be really helpful in providing a lot of that research in one place.

John: And both of you have written many good books that have guided many, many faculty in their careers, and eliminated that gap between what we’re trained to do and what we actually have to do.

Rebecca: So of course, we want to know when we can have this book in our hands.

Todd: Good news for this book, which is exciting because we really cranked away on this thing and it’s listed in Amazon as being due on April 25. But it actually went to press on January 23. So it’s already out and about three months ahead of schedule.

John: Excellent. We’re looking forward to it. I’ve had my copy on preorder since I saw a tweet about this. I think it was your tweet, Todd, a while back. And I’m very much looking forward to receiving a copy of it.

Todd: Excellent. We’re looking forward to people being able to benefit from copies of it.

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

Todd: It’s hard to tell what’s next because I’m exhausted from what’s been [LAUGHTER] ever moving forward, as I’m working on and just finishing a book right now that’s to help faculty in the first year of their teaching. So it’s basically off to a good start. It’s what specifically faculty should do in the first year of getting a teaching position. And aside from that, probably working on my next jigsaw puzzle, I like to do the great big jigsaw puzzles. And so I just finished one that had 33,600 pieces. It is five feet….

Rebecca: Did you say 33,000 pieces?

Todd: No, I said 33,600 pieces.It was the 600 that…

Rebecca: Oh, ok.

Todd: …was difficult. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah.

Todd: When the puzzle is done, it has standard sized pieces, and it is five feet by 20 feet. So I just enjoy massively putting something together. It’s very challenging. So quite frankly, for those about and listening to this is if you imagine 33,600 puzzle pieces, that’s about as many studies as Linda and I have read to put this book together. [LAUGHTER]

Linda: Nothing to it. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: So that’s it for me. [LAUGHTER] Linda, what are you up to these days?

Linda: Oh, well, I live in la la land. So I’m still doing workshops and webinars and things like that mostly on my books of various kinds, various teaching topics. But I think what I want to do is retake up pastels and charcoals. My father was a commercial artist. And so he got me into pastels and charcoals when I was in high school. Well and then I dropped it to go off to college. Well, I want to get back into it in addition to working at the animal shelter. I know. It’s la la land and I wish la la land on everybody that I like.[LAUGHTER] I hope you all go to la la land and enjoy being a four year old all over again, because that’s the way I feel. I adapted to retirement in about 24 hours. That’s pushing it… you know, it’s more like four. But anyway, I slept on it. [LAUGHTER] That was the end of it. But I know I eased into it. I eased into it. I was still writing. I was still doing, especially before the pandemic, a lot of speaking. So then the pandemic hit and it just turned into online everything. And now I’m back on the road again, to a certain extent. I love it. So anyway, it’s a nice balance. So yeah, I wish you all la la land too.

Todd: That’s great.

Rebecca: That’s something to aspire to.

Todd: Yeah, it is. But you know, since you mentioned the speaking things, I just have to do the quick plug here. Linda, I think you and I, years and years ago, were joking around at POD about who would be the first one to get to the 50 states and have done a presentation in every state. And so I gotta tell you, I’m not even sure where you’re at in the mix, but I am at 49 states. And if any of your listeners are in North Dakota, [LAUGHTER] I could certainly use a phone call from North Dakota.

Linda: Well, I want to go to Vermont. I have not been to Vermont…

Todd: Oh, you haven’t.

Linda: …to give a presentation. So I would enjoy that. But I’ll go to Hawaii. I’ll do anything in Hawaii for you. Absolutely anything. [LAUGHTER] I’ll do gardening, [LAUGHTER] I’ll do dishes, your laundry. I don’t care.

Todd: That is good. Yeah, Linda and I had this gig. It was a long, long time ago. And I don’t know, it must have been 20 years ago we talked about it even. And there was some rules too. You had to be invited. And there had to be some kind of an honorarium or just I mean, it didn’t have to be much, but the concept was you just couldn’t show up at a state and start talking. [LAUGHTER] Otherwise, we’d have both been done a long time ago. But yeah,

Linda: Yeah.

Todd: … it was fun. This is the way nerds have fun. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, that’s a competition that’s benefited again, a lot of people over the years.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us. It’s great to see both of you again, and we look forward to seeing your new book.

Linda: Thank you for this opportunity. It was a pleasure.

Todd: It was so much fun. 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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275. Improving Learning and Mental Health

 Student reports of mental health challenges have been rising rapidly for several years. In this episode, Robert Eaton and Bonnie Moon join us to discuss what faculty can do to better support students facing these challenges. Robert and Bonnie aretwo of the authors of Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom, which will be released later this spring by West Virginia University Press.

After completing a law degree at Stanford and working for several years as a litigator and general counsel, Robert returned to academia in 2004 as a member of the Religious Education faculty at BYU-Idaho. He is currently a professor of religious education and a learning and teaching fellow, and has previously served as the Associate Academic Vice President for Academic Development at BYU-Idaho. Bonnie is a member of the math department at BYU-Idaho, where she also serves as STEM Outreach Coordinator.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Student reports of mental health challenges have been rising rapidly for several years. In this episode, we discuss what faculty can do to better support students facing these challenges.

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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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Rebecca: Our guests today are Robert Eaton and Bonnie Moon. They are two of the authors of Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom, which will be released later this spring by West Virginia University Press. After completing a law degree at Stanford and working for several years as a litigator and general counsel, Robert returned to academia in 2004 as a member of the Religious Education faculty at BYU-Idaho. He is currently a professor of religious education and a learning and teaching fellow, and has previously served as the Associate Academic Vice President for Academic Development at BYU-Idaho. Bonnie is a member of the math department at BYU-Idaho, where she also serves as STEM Outreach Coordinator. Welcome Robert and Bonnie.

Robert: Good to be here.

Bonnie: Thank you.

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

Bonnie: [LAUGHTER] I brought my lemon water. Can I still be on your show? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Well, they are two key ingredients of tea.

Bonnie: Yes, right. That’s what I thought.

Robert: And I brought my favorite flavorful herbal tea. Sweet and Spicy Original from Good Earth.

Rebecca: That sounds good. I’m sporting the Hunan jig again, John. That’s all I got. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have a ginger peach green tea today.

Bonnie: Oh, that sounds delicious, too.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom. Could you tell us a little bit about how this project came about?

Robert: It actually started with me. And it’s hard for me to trace exactly when it started. But I’ve been out of the classroom on a full-time basis for a while. And when I got back in, I was amazed to see just how many students were flaming out and fizzling out by the end of the semester because of mental health challenges. And I’d sensed that this was an issue of increasing severity, but still seeing it firsthand, especially after a few years away, was really breathtaking, and got me thinking about the way that we teach and our course design decisions and what effects that might have on students and whether there were things that we as professors could do. So I ended up kicking off a semester-long faculty learning community exercise, we call them a “Think Shop” here and Bonnie was one of the members of that group. And I thought I wanted to tackle a book, and eventually as we got into it, I invited Steve Hunsaker, who’s not with us today and Bonnie to join us. And it’s been a marvelous collaborative effort.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about who your target audience for the book is?

Bonnie: College professors, somebody like me, who didn’t come from a background heavy in psychology or understanding the psyche and to someone that loves mathematics… someone like me, who doesn’t really understand all of the details, but wants her students to feel safe in her classroom and have a safe place to study and to thrive and to be passionate about something. And so, yeah, so college professors, research or at our Institute, we focus on teaching but either kind of Institute.

Robert: So that said, our research assistant has now graduated and is teaching elementary school, and said she uses many of the ideas from the book. And they’ve been relevant even in a K-12 setting. I was thinking through how we probably, from a marketing standpoint, didn’t choose wisely enough… that really many of the ideas in the book would be beneficial to a student, even if their teachers choose not to do any of these things, they could still realize, “Wow, community matters, maybe I should try to connect with some people and create a study group, even if the teacher doesn’t facilitate that.” So I would say college students with mental health challenges and their parents might benefit from it as well,

Rebecca: When we’re running professional development, which is just another setting of teaching, those students might also fit some of these descriptions, too. [LAUGHTER]

John: Could you tell us a little bit more about that faculty learning community that this work began to grow out of?

Robert: A few years ago, we’d started a formalized faculty learning community exercise, we branded ours a “Think Shop,” but basically, it’s a semester-long effort where faculty from different disciplines come together and take a deep dive into the scholarship of learning and teaching or something that affects teaching and we exchange ideas. So we met every week, we each read different things, and I kind of facilitated that and led a discussion. So it was delightful to get to know colleagues better and to brainstorm and benefit from the different disciplinary perspectives. Bonnie, would you add anything to that?

Bonnie:Yeah, I am so grateful that I found that community. Not only are we hopeful that we’ll create a place where students can thrive, but I think it’s important for the professors that run these classes to also model this and to participate in these things. So having that community with other colleagues, especially right at the start at COVID, [LAUGHTER] was very helpful to me and my mental health. And it was just invigorating to learn new things and understand a whole new discipline that I had never studied before and to try and understand what’s happening. So I think it was an opportunity for me just to even model when I’m hoping that my students will do as well.

Robert: It turns out community is not just good for students from a mental health standpoint, but for faculty. For us, the timing was fortuitous, it came right on the front end of the pandemic. So at the time when people were kind of having to withdraw socially we continued it virtually, and it gave us some great community support.

Rebecca: It’s probably worth noting that you just mentioned that this conversation started prior to the pandemic. Certainly, our awareness around mental health issues have been raised and related to the pandemic, but these were growing issues among college students prior to the pandemic, for sure. Can you talk a little bit about why we’re seeing these mental health challenges so prevalent among college students?

Robert: It may be a cop out that we took in the book. But we basically said, what are the root causes of this? We’re not really sure, but we know they’re arriving, and that the problems are real. In fact, one of my fears, sometimes, with the conversations among some of our more hard nosed colleagues, when we talk about roots is that I feel they’re a bit dismissive of the symptoms, and think, well, people just sort of buck up, and if they’d put away their cell phones and move some pipe and work like we used to everything would be fine. I’m fascinated by the debates. And in fact, there was one item, we were going to include in Bonnie’’s chapter, and then a meta analysis came out that was contrary to the other studies that I’ve been seeing. And so we left it out. So I’m puzzled, intrigued, and have my own guesses. It’s hard to ignore technology and the way it’s changed society. So that’s certainly a controversial but leading candidate, but something has changed. There’s a little bit of people being more willing to go and get diagnosed, and maybe a little bit of change of measurement. But there’s some pretty good solid measurements, like attempted suicides or self harm, where it’s not just categorization, where we can see this is really snowballing over time. So our short answer is, we’re not really sure. But we know they’re coming to us with these problems, we are rooting for those people researching the root causes. And we’re kind of leaving that to others as we deal with the symptoms that we see in our classrooms.

John: We’ve always lost a lot of students along the way. And some of that seems to be related to the stress and anxiety that students experience. You describe in your book, the high-risk, high-stakes, environment of college. Why would that tend to increase the prevalence of mental health challenges for students?

Bonnie: So first of all, they’re just coming from maybe a secure place, high school, a place where their teachers were there, they knew them every day, they were very structured, and they knew their schedules, and then they’re coming to this new place to navigate. And it’s a whole new world. And so they’re on their own, their support system is not necessarily in place as they come into this new world. And it’s just like we said in the book about this petri dish just ready [LAUGHTER] for something to happen that does not seem normal or good. And so I think that the uncertain times of it, the deadlines that we put on them, maybe sometimes just not even having a friend. Some of these kids get isolated in their rooms, and they don’t see people for days, and then the teachers start to hopefully miss them. And I think that is part of where we can make a difference. And we were probably going to talk about this later, but when you think about the college experience, the teacher, the professor, is the one that has the most likelihood of seeing these students most often and most regularly, and when we don’t see them. I’m hoping that we’re alarmed. And like, “Where have they been for a week or two weeks or three weeks?” One day, I was in class, and I noticed one of my groups was conversing and that one of the students was really struggling to socially interact with these other kids. And he was just upset and mad. And the other three students were very uncomfortable working with him. And so I started to wonder what was going on. And I made a few phone calls, and one of the students asked me to please call the services on campus… I’m not sure what they were called back then, we’ve been working on this at our campus to get these services more upfront… but I think I ended up calling security because the kids were so worried about this kid, that he was going to be violent, that I ended up calling security. And so security actually had a program where they reached out to him, they went to look for him at his home. And the sad thing is that this kid never showed up to my class again. And so after that experience, I was like “What happened?” like do inform us of things going on. And I found out later on that he had passed away, and there was no details, there was nothing. And as a professor, I was like, “What could I have done?” I didn’t understand, I knew something was kind of strange, but I just didn’t understand, I didn’t have the tools, and it’s not our job to fix these things. But to be able to recognize something in our classes and get these students to places where they can get help. I think that’s something we can do, and it doesn’t go too far outside of the reach of our classroom. We’re trying to build curriculum, we’re trying to build awesome experiences that motivate students. A lot of us might say, we don’t have time for this when I have time to worry about the students outside of our classes. But it would have taken just a couple phone calls, and I know they did reach out. But I don’t know, I don’t know what happened to that student. But still, I feel like I can do something. Even if it’s small I can do something for one person. It matters.

Rebecca: I think the reality is that we often say we don’t have time yet we expend a lot of energy actually worrying about our students, or at least a good portion of faculty do, because they are missing or something seems not quite right and we don’t know what to do. So that energy is being expended whether or not we’re actually acting on it.

Robert: Yeah, in fact, I think there are a couple of false dichotomies to be aware of: one is I either do the stuff I’m supposed to do as a professor or I babysit kids with mental health challenges, or I either focus on being a high expectations professor who really helps students master the content or I just coddle them. And we find those both to be false narratives. For example, I now on the first day of class do things differently than I did the first 10 years. And I have students in teams, I make sure at least one person in the team has already read the syllabus, maybe taking the syllabus quiz, and then I have them show each other. First, I have them connect, get to know each other, share phone numbers, and then I have them show each other all the stuff. And once they’re all done, then I say, “Have you got any questions?” And there are usually relatively few. The dynamic on that first day is fundamentally different and better than it used to be and I get far fewer follow up emails and phone calls asking how to do something because they text each other, they know how to do it. So it’s a simple technique, that’s actually a great one, for helping our students who come to our classroom with some anxiety and wondering if they’re gonna have any help or be able to make any friends. And it actually takes me less time in the course of the next couple of weeks because of the fruitfulness of that investment.

Bonnie: Yeah, what if we could be better teachers, and help our students improve their mental wellness at the same time, and it didn’t take any extra time? Wouldn’t you want that recipe?

Robert: In fact, that’s why we went back and forth on the title, we really struggled. But we wanted to convey the notion that you don’t have to choose between improving learning and mental health, that really virtually every tactic we recommend in the book, we would recommend even to someone who somehow had no students with mental health challenges in their classroom. It just makes for better learning, they happen to also make life much better for students with mental health challenges.

John: One of the really nice things that I observed in reading through your book is that so many of the practices, as you said, are things that are recommended by people who study effective learning techniques. And one of the things you talk about is replacing high stakes exams with lower stakes activities. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Bonnie: Given a little bit away, I’ve been a student myself for the last two years. I took a sabbatical and went back to school. [LAUGHTER]

Robert: And what degree are you pursuing, Bonnie?

Bonnie: And so I love mathematics, but I wanted to see how math works inside of a nuclear reactor, so I went back to school in nuclear engineering. And so, [LAUGHTER] just coming fresh off of that, and having worked on this project with Robin, Steve, I’m like, ”oh, I have so many ideas for you guys about how you could help me not be so stressed out, and not so anxious today.” [LAUGHTER] They didn’t want to hear that. But I was like, “I have some ideas.” But one thing I think that I’m taking back to my classroom from that experience is choice. Like when my professors gave me choice, and they let me follow a path that I was passionate about, I was all in, I didn’t have to be pushed, I was pulled into that direction. And so when I think about assessment in my own classes now, like coming back, and I think about that final exam, and sometimes that is a high-stakes place, and very stressful, even all of our exams can be that way. So for my differential equations course this semester, and I have done this a few times before, I give a choice, of course, between a final exam or final project. And we start talking about this early on. And not all of them want the final project because it is a lot of work. But watching them light up, and to see that they could do something different than sit down and take a test for three hours.[LAUGHTER] It’s just so heartwarming to watch them, and it’s helpful to them. And I was telling Rob and Steve that I had one student that took the project and found something to do inside of his other classes he was taking, and he kind of connected them together. And to watch his passion and to see him come from the student that sat in the back row that seemed mad every day, [LAUGHTER] and when I mentioned this final project, he just lit up and I could see hope, and at the end of the semester, he couldn’t stop. Like I finally said, “You can get some sleep tonight, you don’t need to work on this every minute of the day.” It was just an amazing transformation to see purpose, help him come pull out of this. I don’t know if he was suffering from depression, but he was definitely down a lot in my class, and maybe that was the subject because mathematics tends to make people anxious sometimes anyway, [LAUGHTER] but just to see the turnaround. So I mean, I don’t know that we always have to put everything in one place, but we can give choice and let them kind of have some room to navigate their own way through our courses.

Robert: I should confess that I started from a pretty old school hard-nosed mentality. And that law school, it was a game I played well, so I thought it was a good game. And the in-class instruction, by the way, at my law school was fabulous. I still think that. But the course design, now I look back on that and I think a single assessment that’s three hours long at the end of the semester, and your feedback is one number. So I might have understood a few concepts really well and others really poorly. I actually have no idea. And for that matter, the professor has no idea how well the class is understanding things until she grades the final. She doesn’t have a chance to correct. If I were redesigning law schools, I’d say break it up into four tests. And then make it comprehensive. Give students the opportunity and incentive to fill in their knowledge gaps that they identify on an initial test or assignment. I’m just so embarrassed to admit that that, until I really studied for this and dug in and researched, really didn’t cross my mind. What happens when I give a test to students and many of them bomb it and we just move on. What am I hoping that they’ll learn? …to work harder for their next test? Well if those concepts were really as important and foundational as I claimed they were, I should be more concerned about finding a way to encourage students to go back, fill in those knowledge gaps. And so now I’ve softened up and I give them opportunity and credit, I still give them incentive to try to learn it right the first time, but I’d like to give them some incentive to go back and learn things they crashed and burned on the first time around so that they don’t get left behind.

Rebecca: You mentioned at the start of the conversation that there’s symptoms that we see, we don’t necessarily know the root causes, but we’re seeing the symptoms of various mental health challenges. And those symptoms impact student learning. So there’s a consequence to that. If we’re having anxiety, then we might be presenting that in a particular way. And then that’s probably impacting how learning is happening for us. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? And then we can follow up with “How do we support students who are facing those challenges?”

Bonnie: I think, especially in my math classrooms, I see a lot of stress, anxiety, and the way that I saw it this last week… I’ll just tell you that example. So we were talking about filling in the learning gaps. I do a little bit of just-in-time review so that my students get prepared for class because I understand that when there are those learning gaps, it can be very intimidating to come back to a class and try and start over again. But then as you start to see their stress… and today, the student just started to get angry at something that was going on in my class. And I was like, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Well, my last class, we got to use technology, and we got to do all these things.” And I’m like, “That’s okay.” [LAUGHTER] So I could see that he was stressing out. And he may even have… I don’t know… this was just the symptom, I think, of a deeper identity with him. Like he didn’t identify with math, he didn’t see this math, he saw this as something that he just needed to get through, and stressed people don’t do math very well. [LAUGHTER] And that might be true for other subjects as well. But some of the research I dived into showed that when you’re stressing out and the teacher is coming down on you that you can’t do math, so what are we doing in our classrooms? So I started to rethink things today and said, “What is the root cause of this? What is he really stressing out about?” And that was just a one time thing. But I think maybe you’re asking more about how we identify kids, it’s just not stress, but when they start getting depressed, and when they start having this anxiety. I mean, these are things I think sometimes that are harder to see, unless you’ve been there, or you had experience with that. So one thing that I will share with you is that when I had a situational depression, that was triggered really quickly, I was not prepared for it, I started to withdraw. And I started to come away from my life. And so I can recognize that more easily now, when students start to withdraw from their groups, communicating, or they start to miss class for two or three days in a row. Or they communicate in ways that you really aren’t socially kind, like sometimes they get mad. It’s not just madness, but sometimes they just become very withdrawn and apathetic. I mean, those things are normal for everyday. But if it continues for like two weeks or three weeks, then I start to say this student might be suffering from something that’s depressive or possibly anxiety. So I do look for things like that.

Robert: Let me just add to your question, Rebecca, anxiety, or stress can be a bit like the bull and pit. It can be advantageous sometimes. it can save our lives, when some adrenaline is needed, but in certain situations, and for certain people. In fact, it seems to affect different people differently. It’s very unhelpful in the learning process. So the consensus of the research that we saw suggested that maybe in short, occasional doses, it can be fruitful, but chronic and high doses, stress almost always interferes with the learning process. And then depression, it was just always bad, [LAUGHTER] we just couldn’t find anything saying this was ever helpful to the learning process. And there’s a bunch of physiological explanations for it. But, in fact, one thing to remember is, some of us do well, like I speak better, with some stress than without it. And so those of us who succeed in teaching as careers are probably people who dealt well with that anxiety and stress built into college. And it may make it difficult for us to understand and empathize with students who process that differently. And it may cause us to be just a little callous and say, “Yep, college is stressful, buck up.” But it’s helpful if I then think about how I sing a solo. I sing much worse than I sing in a duet or a quartet. And in practice, I sing better every time than I do in a public performance. [LAUGHTER] So in that area, I can see: “Wow, stress really undermines my performance.” So it’s just a matter of being mindful of how these mental health challenges, generally, when there’s too much of them and they last too long, almost always interfere with learning.

John: What can faculty do to try to create a more supportive but positive environment for the students, which will reduce extreme levels of stress and reduce anxiety which can interfere with learning?

Bonnie: So this is where I’ve been working,[LAUGHTER] coming back from my sabbatical and seeing and feeling the stress. I want to be more aware. And so some of the things that we researched and looked into, I’m starting to use more regularly in my classes. And so one thing for sure, and we hear this a lot, just as a regular teaching strategy is to learn their names as soon as possible when they know that somebody knows them, and somebody understands that they’re not there or they are there, it makes a difference. So this is our first week of school, and so I have put a lot of energy this week into taking those names home and learning their names. And I have an every day classes, this is day three in that class, and just being able to go up to them today and talk to them, ask them their name, their major, and even before class, I’m there trying to understand who they are, a little bit about their background. And so it’s important to me, it’s important to me when I was a student, that they knew my name, and that they knew I was Bonnie Moon, and that this was what my dream is and I’m hopeful that this will happen. And so I think that’s one specific thing that we can do. I realize that some teachers and professors have these huge classrooms [LAUGHTER] with 500 students. So, we’re very lucky here because we have classes between 30 and 50. And so we can learn their names in a couple of weeks if we work hard at it. So I’m very intentional at that at this point.

Robert: I’ll add another just in terms of messaging, we found when we did focus groups that students had had a variety of experiences with professors. So they were looking to read us, they’re looking to see what does this professor really think about my situation and do I dare go ask for a bit of flexibility if a mental health crisis arises. So I added two paragraphs to my syllabus, and I have yet to have anybody I felt like was trying to exploit it or take undue advantage of it. And I’ve had other students thank me who I had no idea had mental health challenges, and they didn’t have to use it. But they said, just knowing that I felt this way, put them at ease. I have this section on mental health challenges:

A growing number of students experience mental health challenges to varying degrees. Doing what you can to stay ahead and on top of depression or anxiety by wisely taking care of yourself will be a key to succeeding academically. But even then, sometimes these challenges can affect your ability to complete the required work. Or a particular assignment might trigger anxiety for you in ways that I’ve not anticipated. Or maybe you reach a point where you just can’t get yourself to class at all. In any of those cases, please come and talk with me, or at least send me an email. I’ll listen and do what I can to help. But the sooner you share your challenges with me, the more I can help. To learn the material and pass the course or earn an A you’ll still need to do every bit as much work as other students…

By the way, as an aside, all the students in our focus groups were not only fine with that, they wanted that. They didn’t want us just to write off assignments that they missed from two weeks that they were in bed with severe depression, continuing:

…but we may be able to find some creative ways to help you do that, especially if you approach me when your problems arise, instead of at the end of the semester.

I think I get a lot more students now willing to come in, my having made it safe through this provision, and let me know about their problems while they’re still in progress and we can still do something about it. Before I was getting a lot more coming in the last week, who were in a hole that was just so deep, I couldn’t, in good conscience, find a way for them to get a passing grade.

Rebecca: So the key is catching them before they disappear.

Robert: Yeah, I think doing some preventive things. So being proactive. We found some interesting studies about just mentors. And as students being less likely to commit suicide if there was an adult they felt like they could talk to about personal things if they needed to whether or not they had taken advantage of that. In fact, for almost everything, the leading intervention that we could find was improving that connection between professors and students. Whether you want to help more students graduate, more students thrive after they graduate, Frankly, even more students participate in class discussion. For all of those different outcomes, the single best intervention seems to be strengthening that connection. So we’ve shared some ideas in the book, and I might just share from our wonderful friend and colleague, Steve, who can’t be with us today, his thought. He says:

This takes me back to Uri Treisman and his amazing work. Treisman, who teaches at University of Texas-Austin tells his students they can succeed in calculus and that they belong, but he goes far beyond asserting that. He traces for students a mathematical genealogy in which they appear at the end of a long chain of ancestors that begins with Leibniz and Newton. He invites his students to meet with him on Saturdays for one-on-one conversations that may not be about calculus, but which are clearly about their success. The depth of Treisman’s heroic dedication to students astounds me, I may never get close to his level of commitment to his students, but I’ve taken a step in that direction by building one-on-one conversations with my students into the semester schedule. I believe that students understand that time is precious and that even 10 unhurried minutes of unscripted conversation about their plans, challenges, and dreams send a clear message about care and commitment.

So, that’s from Steve Hunsaker, our wonderful co-author.

John: So you mentioned both in your book and in the conversation so far that students do care about whether their instructors care about them. We’re not always very good at sharing that, though. I think most professors do care about their students, but that doesn’t always get conveyed. Certainly learning their names is one strategy. Meeting with them one on one is another strategy. And you mentioned, letting all the students know that they’re capable of being successful is one way of doing it. Are there other strategies that faculty could use to let students know that we do care about their success?

Robert: I’ll start with the baby one, if I might, and this one hurts, because even after presenting and teaching about it, I still catch myself doing this. I’m busy. So when I get an email that says, “I’m going to have to miss class on Monday for a funeral, is that absence excused? Or if not, is there anything I can do to make it up?” I tend to go right to “Oh, that is an absence that can be excused. You get three excused absences after that you can make it=…” And then once in a while, the thought will come to my mind, did you catch the word funeral in the email, they’re going to a funeral. They’re a person who’s going to a funeral. So I’ve tried to stop and say, “I’m so sorry to hear that someone you know and love has passed away? Do you mind if I ask who?” And they’ll email back, “It’s my grandma.” And I’ll say, “Tell me how has your grandma blessed your life? How are you like your grandma? What will you miss most about your grandma?” It takes me like 10 seconds [LAUGHTER] extra typing, but it converts what was a transactional email into a human email. So just to be human in our interactions with students, I think, goes much farther than we might imagine.

Bonnie: I’ll add to that. I think accessibility is something we can build into our lives as we look at our semesters, when we’re accessible to students, and we really do meet our office hours or we arrange to meet with them and that we make ourselves available. I think that sends a message that we care about their success and about them. But I think that’s something to do. I know that one semester, my stat students created a project, where they just said “Now are professors really in their classrooms, if they had a question? And so they went around campus during office hours and checked to see if professors were there. [LAUGHTER] And they had a great project. And they found out that their alternative hypothesis that professors are actually there less than they say turned out true. [LAUGHTER] So we had to do some work. But they cared, they care whether we care. So I think accessibility, and then the one thing I would add to that would be how we structure our courses, like we don’t have to go way out of our way to make this happen. We can restructure our courses so that we get the learning done. And actually, we can maybe even improve the learning as we restructure. So an example would be in one of my classes, I have a lab day built in. And it’s not a lab day outside of class time, it’s not asking them to go get in groups outside of class time, I actually create a lab day during the week that we come together and they get to ask questions, they can talk about the homework, they can work on their group projects, because I care that they have a life. I know my class is not their only class and meeting up with groups is difficult. And I care about that. And so I just build it into my curriculum. And so I do a few more videos, I do a little bit more writing so they have some things to prepare for class. If I don’t need to say it during class, I can put it outside of class. And then during class, we can use that time to collaborate and to foster relationships and to think about deep things and to get passionate about things. Because I’m there, the best time for them, I think, is with me. [LAUGHTER] I want them to be there and I want to be their tutor, I want to be the one that sees how they’re doing on their math problems. When they run into a hard math problem. I don’t want them going to the math lab, asking another student that’s at their same level the question. I want them to come ask me. [LAUGHTER] So I set up a day every week, and that’s what we’re going to do on Monday, it’s going to be lab day. And it’s kind of a nice breather after the first week, because I’ve kind of pushed them a little bit getting started, we get right into the mathematics. And then on Monday, we have a lab day, they can breathe and I can talk to them about how things are going, I can kind of assess how I’m doing with the teaching. And if I need to change things around for the next week, we can build it into our classrooms.

Robert: I’ve started using Calendly or then I moved to Bookings, but to make it easier for students to access me. And so it’s just anytime that’s available on my calendar, they can meet with me. And when they meet with me… I stumbled on this last semester… I’ve said have you got your phone with you? Of course they have their phone with them. Would you mind showing me a photo or two or a video that would help me better understand you. So this morning, a student shows me a fascinating photo of him and two friends and his snowmobile and a big hole that he’d gotten stuck in, and told me about his love for snowmobiling. I will remember him better and understand him better because of that. I’ve been amazed at the things that students have shared with me and how understanding their backstories changes my perception. I remember asking one student “Just tell me your backstory.” He said, “Well, I was abandoned by the side of the road, I guess because I had a cleft palate. And then I was in an orphanage until I was adopted.” He was in another country. Wow. This was a student who sometimes didn’t stop talking as soon as I would have liked him to stop talking after we’d done a small group discussion. I just saw him in a whole different light and was amazed by the things that he was accomplishing. So understanding students’ backstories, I think, helps strengthen that connection we have with them.

Rebecca: One of the things that I really appreciate about the examples that you’re sharing are that none of them are big time commitments. None of them are huge asks, but they’re cumulative when they add up, and they add up in a way that really demonstrates care, and then when I’m doing it, and John’s doing it, and Rob’s doing it, and Bonnie is doing it, then the student really feels supported.

Robert: That would be our dream, the more people who do these kinds of things, the greater the support network for our students. And you know, once in a while, we’ll do some things that we wouldn’t otherwise have done. On occasion, I will walk a student who is suicidal over directly to the mental health center, to the counseling center. And so it takes me five or 10 minutes, but at the end of the day, I feel like those were probably the most five or 10 important minutes of the day. Actually, that does remind me of one other thing. We’ve talked about connecting with the students, course design decisions, classroom tactical decisions, but we do play a role as gatekeepers. We’re in a position, not to provide mental health counseling, but to spot students in need. Students, when we do the kinds of things we talk about, tend to trust us. And then I’m surprised how many will describe what, to me as a layperson, sounds like depression, but they’ve never been treated for it, they’ve never seen a counselor. And so I just make the pitch. “Wow, I’m not a mental health professional, but I’ve talked to many students with similar symptoms who’ve gone to the counseling center, it’s free here, and wow, they’ve gotten some great help, and let me introduce you to some other resources.” So just being that wise friend who knows how to connect people with resources, we’re in a unique position to do that, as professors. We may as well learn how to do it.

John: And I’ve noticed that students are much more receptive to that than they were 20-30 years ago, where there appeared to be more of a stigma associated with that. So reaching out that way can make a big difference. And I know I’ve been referring more students for mental health assistance on campus than I ever have before.

Robert: And we can contribute to that continuing evolution by making our classrooms a safe place by saying “I love to go out into the gardens and meditate periodically, I experience stress and sometimes get physical symptoms. It’s a great way for me to cope with my stress.” By just saying that, I’ve signaled to students that it’s okay to talk about it. Sometimes two or three weeks before the end of the semester, I’ll take a meta moment and say, “Hey, some of you have been here longer than others, what are some keys to not exploding during the final two weeks of the semester. Go!” A discussion erupts in which they’re remarkably candid, and they’re spot on. They talk all about things that Bonnie included in our chapter on wellness. But again, it makes it safe, and they get some good counsel from each other.

Bonnie: I agree. And when we bring that to the classroom, we actually are real, and say, “You know what? I do have some stress. And I’m probably a little overwhelmed right now. And I want to back off and love you guys and set some boundaries for ourselves too.” Like, “I’m going to check my email within 24 hours. But usually after six o’clock at night, I’m done checking email…” and let them know that you’re gonna take care of yourself too. And hopefully, they can see that that’s important to you, and they will say “I need to take care of me too.” And it’s okay to have those conversations and as you develop those relationships, you can be a little more candid and they will feel, I think, more free to come to you when they do have a problem if you’re honest and authentic and say, “Yeah, I’m a real person, like I actually have to eat [LAUGHTER] and take care of myself and I have a goal this semester.” I told my students, on Wednesday, we started, that I’m going to do the lazy woman iron. Is it like the iron woman?”

Robert: Yeah, the Iron Man.

Bonnie: Yeah, the Iron Man, and I said, you know, I’m not good at it. I want to get back in shape after COVID and Christmas. And I said, if I see you guys at the gym, that’d be awesome. Please don’t make fun of me. [LAUGHTER] But I’m gonna be on the treadmill trying to get my miles in, and in a month, I get to do an Iron man. I think I can do that. And it’s just fun to open up with them. And there’s possibilities as you’re studying hard, you can still take care of yourself outside of that, and as your professor, I’m gonna take care of myself, because I want to be good for you. I want to be healthy for you. And I want to be excited to be here tomorrow and the next day, and to do that I want to take care of myself too.

Robert: So promoting wellness practices, I think we’re uniquely positioned to encourage students to get enough sleep, to eat well, to exercise, without being preachy about it, and we’re vulnerable in the way that Bonnie just described. That could inspire a number of students to step back and think maybe I could incorporate more exercise into my daily routine.

Rebecca: Again, those are small things that don’t take a lot of time. It’s a small little conversation or a small little anecdote that you share to set the stage for wellness. So it’s not as hard as sometimes we imagined it to be.

Bonnie: I don’t want to overwhelm professors either, ‘cause it could get overwhelming thinking I need to do all this, but, like you said, one or two things can make a big difference. Just a simple thing that Rob inspired me with and Steve too, to talk about. We live in a place where it’s cold, a lot of the year, [LAUGHTER]…

Rebecca: … me too.

Bonnie: … lots of snow here in Idaho. Yeah. And so it can get a little depressing anyway, because of the climate here. But, I send a roll around to see who’s there every time because I do keep rolls, not for the grade, but just because I want to know who’s there. And I say, “If you’re here I want to know, if you’re not here, I want to know. So I send the roll around, and I sent a question around yesterday about what are some fun things you can do outside in Rexburg, like when you need a break. And so then they write their name down and give ideas and so we send that around and it’s super easy. I didn’t have to take any time out of class for that. They signed up and then the other day I asked, “So, what’s your favorite comfort foods?” just kind of get to know them and show that you care about them. But it’s like a super easy way to take care of things and to inspire them to maybe do some wellness that week. [LAUGHTER] And think about those things that they might not be thinking about.

Robert: Rebecca, you have mentioned this a couple of times that it caused me to look up a quote by one of my mentors who happens to be the father of our current university, President Henry B. Eyring. He talked about how small changes can often have a big impact. And he said, “The best place to look for small changes we could make in things is in things we do often. There is power and steadiness and repetition.” And if we can lead by inspiration, or intuition, if you will, choose the right small things to change, consistent change will bring great improvement. So really, there are some things that we suggest, that if they were to change from one final at the law school to four different tests, and then a comprehensive final, that’s a bigger change. But much of what we advocate in the book is something that you can do quite simply, and much as I love many coherent systems of teaching, they intimidate me, like Project Based Learning, it sounds really cool, it’s just been a bridge too far for me. I just haven’t been willing to make the huge investment, it feels like I would need to make to switch my course over to that all the way. On the other hand, I could show up to class a little bit early and sit next to a student and get to know her, see how she’s doing, and connect with her. That’s a small change I can make.

Rebecca: Related to mental health, one of the things that many of our colleagues have certainly noted and there’s been many articles in The Chronicle and other places about this is the idea that students seem pretty disengaged right now. They’ve survived multiple semesters of COVID and other world complications and seem disengaged. Sometimes they’re doing the work. Sometimes we’re seeing students disappear. Sometimes they’re in class not doing anything. Sometimes they’re doing stuff outside of class. It looks different depending on the students. But there’s this general sentiment of disengagement. How do we help students feel engaged or reinvigorate their energy around learning?

Robert: Let me try three concrete ideas and then I think Bonnie might have some as well. First, at the risk of beating a dead horse, the more connected they feel with us, the less disengaged they tend to be in our classroom. I noticed when I sit next to a student and chat a little bit before class, that student who has not made a comment all semester, a good chunk of the time they will volunteer a comment for the first time. It seems to be a strong correlation there. Another thing that I learned in researching this book, and we did a survey of our students, one of the things that causes the the most anxiety was when the course was moving on, the class was moving on, and they felt like they didn’t understand something. I heard Sal Khan at a talk at Stanford say that the problem with the monolithic approach to higher ed or to education in the United States is that we kind of assume everybody moves at the same speed. So we did a test on chapter one, which is learning to ride a bike and a bunch of students get a C or a D or an F, and then we move on to riding a unicycle in chapter two, and we’re surprised when they fall off. We’ve given them no incentive to go back and master bike riding first. Just this week, I had a conversation with a student who’s a family friend, he grew up in our neighborhood, and he’d struggled. He said, “This is my redemption semester.” He was going to do some things differently. And I said, so here’s what to do differently, especially in your math class. When you get a poor score on a test, try to figure out what things you didn’t understand and go watch Khan Academy videos, or go to the TA or the tutoring lab, and figure out what those things are. I happen to be here on campus last night, and I saw him at about 8:30 when I left, and he had been watching Khan Academy videos, and said this was transformative. It really hadn’t crossed his mind before to fill in the gaps. But what happens I think is if that train leaves with students not on it, they then get disengaged, they’re lost. So if we can build into our course design ways and incentives for them to master what they don’t initially master, I think they’ll remain more engaged.

Bonnie: I agree with all that, actually and thanks for bringing in mathematics.[LAUGHTER]

Robert: Always given you a nod when I can.

Bonnie: I could always use some advice and some help there too. But I wanted to add to that… I guess, maybe emphasize… the importance of that connection, and choice and passion. sometimes we get a little dispassionate with our lives, or we’re going in a direction, it just seems that’s not really where we want to be. And as a teacher, it’s an opportunity to get to know kids, find out what their passions are, and maybe help to see some of that passion in your course. And I realize this might take a little bit more time, but sometimes it’s worth it. When we think about our projects and I find out the students majors and maybe a little bit about what professors they’re also working with, sometimes I can tailor a project to them, like I talked about before, and the students can come alive. At the same time. I think we need to be realistic too, some of these students might not really be disengaged, they might be overwhelmed. They have a job outside of your class. They have another 16 credits they’re taking. They may have other family and things like that that they’re working with. So it might not be about you [LAUGHTER] or your class, it might be about all these other things they’re dealing with and we could try to give good counsel as advisors and mentors and invite them not to overbook themselves. It’s not about how fast to get there but about the journey and as you go, you can try those things, but sometimes, they’re just overwhelmed and they can’t do your class too and do it well and everything else. So, sometimes I do ask my students do you really want to take my class this semester? [LAUGHTER] I’d be happy to see you next semester, but maybe you do need to cut out something because the disengagement might be actually something else.

Robert: In fact, I’ll throw that out too. I try to proactively by the second or third of the week of the semester, now reach out to my students who are falling behind in terms of their grades. Most of them are falling behind, not only in my course, but other courses. And so now I try to counsel them a bit more holistically, not just get my assignments done, it’s “So tell me a little bit about your approach. How’s it compared to what you were doing in high school?” Nobody’s really, especially if you’re a first-generation college student, nobody’s explained the rules that in high school, you could get by with very little homework. And in college, it’s flipped. You’re supposed to spend much more time doing homework. I talked to one student and asked him how much he was studying every day and he said an hour. He said it proudly. I said, “No, I mean, like, for all of your classes, and he opens up his calendar, he said, “No, I’ve got a study hour every day.” And I said, “Oh….oh, oh, oh, did you know it’s supposed to be two hours for every credit hour, like if you’re taking 14 credits, you should be spending 28 hours. Think of it like a job, you want to put in like 40 hours a week. This was an epiphany. I think he was a first-generation college student. Somehow nobody had made that clear to him, and he was failing in almost all of his class. So when we’re proactive, reach out to struggling students early, we often find that they’ve got other issues going on, or just haven’t figured out the rules of the game for college life and how to succeed. And that can cause anybody anxiety.

John: One of the things you suggest in your book is that people consider exploring QPR training. I know we have that on our campus, and we recommend that faculty participate in that. Could you talk just a little bit about that, and what its role may be in dealing with students who face more severe challenges.

Robert: So for me two big takeaways are that just as if you were playing soccer, and a friend crashed into somebody, and you could see the bone sticking out, you would say, “let me help you go to the emergency room.” You’re not a doctor. But if they say, “No, no, I’m fine.” You say “I see the bone sticking out. I haven’t been to medical school, but that seems like a bad thing.” Let’s get you into the car in to the doctor. So just knowing that it’s okay, I think sometimes we feel like it’s illegal for me to engage in counseling. Therefore, I can’t say anything at all about this. So that QPR is kind of a twist on CPR that just as if there are no doctors around and someone’s had a heart attack, it’s helpful to have a civilian do CPR, It’s helpful if I’ve got a student in my office, who I can tell as a lay person and with a little bit of training, wow, they’re struggling to get out of bed. And so now, the other thing I came away with from that is, it’s okay for me to ask “Are you feeling suicidal? Have you had thoughts of taking your life? Have you got a method?” Let me take you to the counseling center, and then just kind of spot. And then the other big takeaway for me was that studies show if they will promise you that they won’t take their life without calling you, people are much less likely to take their life. So I wouldn’t have felt comfortable or thought that was appropriate before I took that QPR training. I found that it’s made me feel like a lay clinician, and it’s alright for me to talk about those things. And now, over the last three years or so, I’ve taken several students who are suicidal to that counseling center. In fact, in a church setting, I was talking about this, and a young woman who was a leader in her congregation texted me that Sunday night and said, “Would you walk with me tomorrow?” She was a leader. She knew exactly where the health center was. She didn’t need me to show her. But she wanted someone just to walk her over there. And I asked her before we went, “Are you feeling suicidal?” And she was. So just to be that friend who can connect people in dire need with mental health professionals is a critical role that I think any of us can play in any walk of life, but especially as teachers.

Rebecca: For those that aren’t familiar, QPR stands for Question, Persuade and Refer.

Robert: Thank you.

Rebecca: I was looking enough just to make sure I had it right. [LAUGHTER]

John: And the training tells you what questions to ask including, “Are you feeling suicidal?” and then persuade them to get assistance and refer them to the assistance, including walking people over when needed.

Rebecca: I know that when I went through the training, I quite literally used it the next day. So it’s a useful thing to take the time to learn. And it does give you the tool set or the toolbox to feel like you can engage when necessary.

Robert: It probably gets your antennae up too.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Robert: You might have spotted that thing before but I think I’m more likely to spot some things now, to see disengagement that’s kind of come on quickly to the student in class or absences and reach out.

Rebecca: Or maybe to act on the thing that you spot that you weren’t quite sure of.

Robert: Yes.

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

Bonnie: So next, I’m going home. [LAUGHTER] I can answer this so well, and eating the dinner that my husband, I think, made for me [LAUGHTER] after this first stressful week of the first week of school because he knows I’ve been so intentional this week about trying to be there for my students. I’ve worked long hours this week. I haven’t taken care of myself as much as I want to. So I’m going to go home, take care of myself this weekend, and hopefully, on Monday be refreshed for my students and I’m so excited to keep using some of these ideas and becoming their friends. I love working on my classes because I feel like we’re friends, and it’s only been three days, but I can’t wait to see my friends on Monday and I hope they feel that teamwork and that team that we become, I think, as we become a team throughout the semester. Some of these things don’t come up as often in my class, I don’t see the stress as often as they feel that teamwork. So I think the next thing for me is just to continue to work on being a good team member and creating this team that I want to see this semester… after I get some good dinner and a good night’s rest. [LAUGHTER]

Robert: I’m glad you at least include a good dinner because I feel like my answer is very selfish [LAUGHTER] compared to your selfless outward facing answer. But my career’s been unusual. I’ve spent about half of my time at BYU Idaho in academic leadership. And so just in the last couple of years have been able to dive in and research and write about these things. I’d kind of like to go speak to people who are interested in hearing about this, do workshops together with people who are learning how to improve this. I also helped teach a course that I designed and have team taught for the last six years with a couple of colleagues here for our new faculty. It’s a semester-long course. And so I’ve recently written a textbook for that course. That’s kind of all the stuff we think new teachers should know. I think we’re calling it Architects of Learning. And so I’ve got that to a point where eventually I’ll pursue publishers, figure out how to get those ideas out there as well. But build on some of the kind of the same stuff that’s laced through this book about just being intentional about the decisions we make in our tactical classroom decisions and our course design decisions can go a long way to improving learning.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciated getting to know you and your work better and sharing it with our audience.

John: While we were able to see an advance copy of this, we are wondering when the copy will be released to the public. Mine is on preorder.

Robert: Yes, so it’s preorder and it’s March or April, West Virginia University Press has told us. So we’re looking forward to that actually getting out there soon. And we’re so grateful that you would have us on your show. We love connecting with kindred spirits who care about teaching and learning and education can do to make people’s lives better. Thank you.

Bonnie: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you

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

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

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273. North of Neutral

Reports of student mental health concerns have been rising steadily during the last few years. The traditional approach is to assist those dealing with these concerns only after they have been reported. In this episode, Amy Bidwell joins us to discuss an alternative approach that focuses on strategies that can help our students improve their ability to thrive, even under adverse conditions.

Show Notes

  • A video in which Christpher Peterson described positive psychology.
  • Martin Seligman
  • PERMA
  • SAMSHA
  • Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Positive emotions broaden and build. Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 47, pp. 1-53). Academic Press.
  • PubMed
  • Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-rich education: How human connections drive success in college. JHU Press.

Transcript

John: Reports of student mental health concerns have been rising steadily during the last few years. The traditional approach is to assist those dealing with these concerns only after they have been reported. In this episode, we explore an alternative approach that focuses on strategies that can help our students improve their ability to thrive, even under adverse conditions.

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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.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Amy Bidwell, an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Health Promotion and Wellness at the State University of New York at Oswego. Welcome back, Amy.

Amy: Thank you, John. Thank you, Rebecca.

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

Amy: I had tea earlier. And I was going to show you my mug but you can’t really see it anyways, It’s called Be Well, but it was a new raspberry green tea that I got for Christmas. Very good actually.

Rebecca: That sounds good. How about you, John?

John: And on a similar theme, mine isn’t so much “be well,” but it is a blueberry green tea.

Rebecca: Mine at least sounds well. It’s the Hunan Jig.

Amy: I don’t know what that is.

Rebecca: It’s a black tea that has some blonde tips in it. That’s pretty tasty.

Amy: Wow, I was thinking, the blueberry one, lots of antioxidants. That’s good.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss some strategies that can be used for anyone to improve their morale during these relatively challenging times. Could you talk a little bit about some strategies that people can use to improve their general mood?

Amy: Definitely. Thank you, John. Thank you, Rebecca, for having me. One thing that I would love to just start with is the fact that we all know generally what we’re supposed to do to stay well, yet, we aren’t exactly well, especially right now. And so I think the approach that I take from this is slightly different in a sense, where it really looks at the overall person in terms of more, how do we thrive in life? Not “are we healthy?” Because that’s one thing. Yes, we’re drinking our blueberry tea. But are we actually thriving in life? Are we happy in life. And I think that there’s a distinct difference there. There’s the “I’m healthy,” and “I’m well.” And if you go to the doctor, and you get a good, clean checkup, and your cholesterol is good, and your blood pressure is good, you walk out and you’re like, “Ah, good, I’m healthy,” but are you well? and that’s really the perspective that I take. Because if you look at overall health, it really looks at “are all of your measurements healthy?” But what thriving really looks at is we really want to stay with what we call “north of neutral.” And Christopher Peterson is a huge researcher, he has since passed, that really put this into the forefront, which is how do we stay north of neutral? So the typical kind of treatment method of health is to make sure that we’re treating any sort of issues so that you can be healthy. Well, staying north of neutral is really developing skills in your toolbox, resources in your toolbox, to allow yourself to stay healthy and well, so that when adverse things happen, like major pandemics, your body, your mental state, your physical state, can actually absorb that trauma and that stress and be able to handle it and still be considered well. And that’s really the difference. So if we look at a treatment method, from more of the traditional psychological perspective, really take somebody that may have some mental health issues, disorders and then treat them to get them at that zero baseline. So we go from maybe a negative seven, where we have some sort of mental health disorder, to a zero, but then when a pandemic hits, or something as simple as a nasty email that pops into your inbox just really bothers you, right? So you’re now at a zero and then you went back to your negative. We don’t want that negative, right? So if we can keep people north of neutral, and so again, at maybe a positive six, positive seven, when they get that nasty email, it might pop them to maybe a four, but they’re still on that positive side. And so that’s really that difference. And obviously, when you have significant trauma, a death in the family, a pandemic, loss of job, those are going to impact your overall well being much more. But again, if you can stay north of neutral, it still won’t get you to that zero or negative side. And so a lot of the tools and strategies that I have researched myself, but there’s actually an enormous amount of research… I counted this morning, I have 77 articles on my computer right now that are waiting for me to do a systemic review on. I haven’t done it yet. They’ve been sitting there and they’re going to get done soon. Martin Seligman is kind of the founder of positive psychology in the modern day, and he was, I believe it was in 96ish, he was the American Psychological Association president for a year and that’s when he really started working with Christopher Peterson and kind of looked at this phenomenon of north of neutral. And why are we focusing so much on treatment, when we could actually be focusing on prevention? So he started this positive psychology movement, which has since really turned into more the study of human flourishing. Some of the theory that Martin Seligman came up with is this theory of wellbeing that looks at PERMA. And what PERMA is, is positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishments, and then since over the past 10 years, vitality has been attached to that. But what that is, is those are those six components that an individual must have in order to truly flourish and thrive in life. So staying north of neutral. And what I’ve really been researching is those six aspects, and I’ve actually used them in my classroom a lot.

Rebecca: One of the things that we’re always thinking about is, and we’ve talked a lot about mental health challenges that our students are facing and also burnout [LAUGHTER] that faculty are facing from addressing a lot of the urgency around the pandemic, and you’re talking a lot about moving to north of neutral, I think many of us are feeling like AAAHHHH, [LAUGHTER] still having a lot of stress. So what are some strategies to help us as faculty and staff maybe stay north of neutral or get a little above neutral so that we are able to handle the stressors of our everyday jobs and the added stress of working with other people?

Amy: Rebecca, that’s a great question. There’s many answers, but the easiest that everybody can do right now is social media. So what I mean by that is, I don’t know what the percentage is, but John, you probably have this stat somewhere, the percentage of negative comments that are on social media versus positive. My number one recommendation is, and I did this myself, I have completely gotten off social media. Now, when I say that, I still use Pinterest once a while, I’m not sure if that’s considered social media, but I do have a backyard I’m trying to landscape. But when you get up in the morning, everybody grabs their phone to turn their alarm off, you need to put that phone right back down. A lot of the research says that for the first hour that you’re awake, no technology… imagine that, like John, comprehend that one. He’s thinking, nope, that’s not gonna happen. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ll see. I’m mostly just on Facebook and Twitter, and that’s only positive material, [LAUGHTER], as I’m sure you’ve experienced too.

Amy: Which is why I don’t have Facebook and Twitter anymore. [LAUGHTER] And honestly, it’s funny, because I’ve had this conversation with people about Facebook. And of course, you know, in my generation, that’s kind of what it was. My daughter does Snapchat, but I’m the Facebook generation. So the thing is, even if you go on today, and you see your best friend in this beautiful Caribbean vacation, it’s supposed to be something happy, right? Well, not so much. Because as I’m sitting in my office, I’m looking at a rainy gray sky. So immediately, my emotion has now changed. And ironically, as I’m miserable looking out my window, because it’s gray and gloomy out, I just received an email from someone berating me about something I didn’t do. So now I’ve just gotten a little bit higher, and it just compiles and then I have someone knocking on my office door… this isn’t really happening… but someone knocking on my office door asking more from me. And it’s like, AAhh, I can’t do it. And all this started with looking at my friend’s Caribbean vacation. And again, there’s a ton of research to support how our emotions are affected the second we wake up. So another tool that’s really great… and I got my students to do this… is okay, your alarm goes off, you turn the alarm off, you turn your phone off, you’re not gonna get on technology. Before you get out of bed, visualize your day. So for instance, Rebecca, you had already mentioned that you have three recordings on Friday. So immediately that’s stress, right, the immediate stress that that can cause. I’ll use a different example. I unfortunately had a cousin pass away unexpectedly a few months ago. And all of a sudden, I found out I had to drive my mother to North Carolina. So in a car for 12 hours with my mother, just the two of us. And it was like, “Okay, the next day we had to go.” And so when I woke up in the morning, I immediately visualized what my day could look like, not what I’m thinking it might look like but what do I want it to look like? And so by doing that, the second you wake up, visualizing the good in your day, instead of “Oh my gosh, I have five meetings, three recordings. I have to sit in the car for 12 hours with my mother,” those types of little tiny things are things that can really help us

Rebecca: I think in a time of great distress, little things are always a good first step, for sure.

Amy: And that’s what it’s a lot about, is these little things. And when people think of positive psychology and the science of happiness, they kind of immediately go to oh, “let’s just walk in a room and be happy.” It’s not that at all, it’s these little tiny things. And again, it starts with the second you wake up in the morning. A tool that I used with my students, that was amazing, first time I ever did it this November, right before Thanksgiving break, I had them all sit in class and write a letter to someone that they’re grateful for, and grateful letters, they have been researched for the last few decades of the importance of positive emotion. But the kicker was they had to write it, then when they went home, they had to go to the person’s house, stand there and read it to them. They said it was literally life changing. And not only that, the research shows that doing grateful letters or gratefulness, the impact over a long period of time is substantial. And so that’s a really great simple, simple thing that we can do to help improve our day-to-day emotions.

John: And even just reflections on things to be grateful each day have been shown to be effective in improving overall happiness and satisfaction.

Rebecca: If we all start with a little more gratitude, we probably will be much happier when we’re around other people and [LAUGHTER] we’ll spread the gratitude-ness. [LAUGHTER]

Amy: But Rebecca, what you said, that’s actually scientifically proven, that if the three of us are in a room together, and I come in in a more positive mood, it immediately affects you too. And so I have really changed as a department chair. Unfortunately, when I took over as department chair COVID hit the next semester. So my whole experience as chair has essentially been putting band aids on things. But the first 18 months or so I would walk in a room like a chicken with my head cut off. And what happens is that vibe is now spread across my conference room. Since I started taking this nine-month training that I was granted funding through SAMSHA and the Counseling Center to basically learn the scientific study of human flourishing, I have completely changed my approach to meetings. And it’s something as simple as my attitude walking through the door. I’m not rushed. I’m not flustered. It completely changes the vibe of your staff.

REBECCAS: …or of a classroom, I am sure.

Amy: Yes, and I haven’t mastered the art of getting to class early yet. At some point I will. I get there on time, but definitely not early. I agree with that 100%, and I certainly can share some ideas of things to use in the classroom as well.

John: You started with an acronym, maybe if you could talk a little bit about each of the components and provide an example of how each component can be used in practice.

Amy: Definitely. So, again, PERMA-V. So P is positive emotion. And that’s really where most of the research is at this point. And this is something in the classroom that can be really important because if we look at Barbara Fredrickson’s research on broaden and build, there is so much research on changing the attitude of the classroom the second you walk in to more of a positive state. It could be that, and I was just discussing this with someone earlier on a meeting, having each person go around and just quickly yell out one thing that they’re grateful for that day. Now, obviously, John, in your 400 Student economics class that might take some time. With that said, if you just, once a week or twice a week, have three people randomly do it, it keeps people on their toes. And that immediately changes the vibe of the classroom, which then increases those individuals’ ability to learn and retain information. So the positive emotions, there’s a ton of research with that, from an employee/faculty idea is this kind of negativity bias. And again, that’s something that’s been studied a lot. And that’s the thought of going in with that negative emotion. So I’m walking into a staff meeting, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe we have another meeting about meetings. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to listen to this person just sit on their soapbox.” So going in with a positive attitude and saying, “I’m excited to see my colleagues again,” really changes things up. The next one is engagement. And this is where you are in a situation where you are 100% engaged in what you’re doing. And so I can just see looking at John and Rebecca they’re just totally engaged with what I’m saying.

Rebecca: And so you only can see that because we’re on video while we’re recording [LAUGHTER]

Amy: But, you were so engaged with what I’m saying, I’m sure. And I know everybody that listens to the Tea for Teaching is very much engaged in what they’re listening to. And so think of something that you can do every day where you completely lose track of time. For me, it’s reading, I just absolutely love to read. I’m going to say actually, it’s also going down the research black hole on PubMed. But those are the things where you completely lose track of time. Your classroom, you want to give students activities or something that they can do where they actually are so engaged that they lose track of time, which I don’t know if anyone’s really mastered that yet, but we’ll get there. Relationships, research shows that social wellness, in fact, a lot of the COVID research now they’re saying that the social isolation that we experienced during COVID was more detrimental to our health than obesity. So I find that interesting. Relationships from a college perspective, one of the number one reasons students leave college, they don’t feel socially connected to the campus. We have to provide relationships. So breaking down those barriers with our students where the professor is up here and students down here, we want to try to create those relationships where the students understand that it’s not just this person speaking to us, but they’re with us.

Rebecca: It seems like the Relationship-Rich Education book would be a great resource for people to tap into to think about ways and roles that relationships play in a positive affect towards their college or university.

Amy: In fact, when I was reading that book, I was part of that book club, it was almost like I was reading a book on human flourishing, it was spot on; everything that they said was spot on. So I agree with that. Meaning… meaning is “What is your overall purpose in life?” And I do this with my students, especially with first-year students. Okay, what do you want to do when you graduate? Okay, I want to be an engineer, I want to be an economist. But what is your passion? What is your purpose? In 10 years from now, when your alarm goes off on a Monday morning, after a long weekend, do you jump out of bed? Or do you say, “Uh, I gotta go collect my paycheck.” You want to do something that truly brings you some sort of purpose or meaning. For me, it’s helping my daughter with her homework. That’s not much. But that gives me a sense of purpose. Accomplishment… we all know we need this, not to say that we give everybody a trophy, but we need to experience some sort of excellence or accomplishments. And this goes back, John, I know you’ve talked a lot about low stakes-grading and low-stakes assignments. Students need that, because it’s giving them that little touch of positivity, that touch of achievement. Accomplishment increases their emotions. And then the last one is vitality. This is what we hear about when we think of well-being. This is our health. This is our mental health. This is our physical health. This is getting enough sleep, decreased stress. But in general, like I said, the PERMA-V theory of well-being states that we should experience all of these each day. And it can be in small amounts, very small amounts, something as simple as actually saying hi to the person at Dunkin Donuts, instead of just saying hi, it’s like, hi, like look them in the eye, something as simple as that can increase positive emotion.

John: How have students responded when you’ve discussed some of these strategies in your classes?

Amy: It’s interesting, because if you ask my students what positive psychology is… actually, they would know because I do use that term a lot. But half the time they don’t even know what they’re doing, like in terms of “Oh, this is actually increasing my happiness,” or “this is actually making me feel fulfilled.” And so in my first-year course, in my Be Well course, I probably, if I had to take a guess, about 15 activities throughout the semester that I incorporate that are specifically evidence-based activities and resources that I implement. And in fact, I am currently collaborating with a group from the UK to implement the exact same resources and activities in both communities, both schools. But the students, because I actually did evaluate the effectiveness of it… it’s amazing. And I’m not just saying that from an anecdotal perspective, I did actually do the research. I’m in the process of analyzing the data right now. And we did some mixed methods analysis to look at: 1. did it actually help improve their ability to flourish and thrive? So we’re using evidence-based validated surveys to measure this. And then we’re also doing qualitative data where we’re doing some semi-structured interviewing and looking at the themes that are being pulled and one thing that always kept coming to the top was this theme of this positive emotion in the classroom. So the atmosphere that I portrayed, but in my class, it’s slightly unique… so I do have coaches that I use and their attitude in the classroom. And one thing that we did in almost all of our classes is the one thing that you’re grateful for. That was something that we did all the time that they absolutely loved. But the visualization that we used to do, we would spend the first five minutes of class journaling. And I know this isn’t feasible in all classes. But even if you did two minutes of journaling, by visualizing, what is the rest of my day going to look like? Because again, if you sit there and say, “Oh, my gosh, I have three more classes today,” there goes that emotion. And so we visualize “What does this day look like?” Yes, you have three classes after this. But let me write down and visualize how I can actually make this day look a little better. It sounds superficial, but it had huge impact on them. The low-stakes assignments they really liked, because of that sense of achievement was really, really important. The social connections… and again, I don’t teach large classrooms, the largest I’ve ever taught was 50 students… so I don’t know what this could look like in a large group setting, but they really loved having this kind of collaborative group that they were able to text and become friends with, that really enhanced the relationships. So those are some of the main themes. I would say stay tuned, because my colleague Jessica Harris and I are literally in the midst of writing a paper that will be submitted by the end of the month on all the data that we’ve collected on this whole positive psychology in the classroom.

Rebecca: I’m curious, Amy, about some initial resistance that you might get from some students, and then maybe they try it, and it works well. And how you might counter some of that initial resistance that you might get.

Amy: Great question. And I will tell you that 90% of the time, I have resistance, so I’m not going to pretend that this is all happy-ology. It’s not, it is difficult, and I would say you just keep doing it. So, for instance, one thing you’re grateful for, it’s like, “ah…Mom, really?” and they all say “Oh, my family, my friends.” Well, then I take that off the table, and it makes them dig a little deeper. But this is the thing, Rebecca, is I don’t need to keep reiterating the importance because they do it once and they feel it, they actually feel the change that it has in their emotions. There’s a great tool… I would love to do this… I’ve yet to do this in my class… but, I went to a happiness retreat two years ago. And one of the activities that we had to do, and these were complete strangers, we had to stare into the individual’s eyes for five minutes. I mean, you could blink it wasn’t like a game, but you literally just stare into their eyes, the emotion that comes up with that is intense. And so you just do this once, and the students feel it, they feel the change that it has in their emotion, and they buy into it. But no doubt, resistance is there. It’s just a matter of “Guys, let’s just play along, play along with me, try this out. Let me know what it feels like.” Meditation… I would do it with meditation. I’d say it got the most resistance with that. But we worked around it. And now I think there’s probably more students in the class that meditate than not.

John: One criticism of positive psychology and also the research on grit and on growth mindset is that it’s sometimes accused of being a very western individualistic approach, which ignores the role of society in influencing happiness and economic inequality. And the fact that some people are in really difficult circumstances, and it assigns responsibility for their happiness to them, when there are societal influences. Given those concerns, why might it still be worthwhile to work on these things?

Amy: Great question. And the importance of that question in this day and age is huge. The research shows that anywhere from about 40 to 50% of our overall happiness is genetically influenced. Then we have about 10% that is affected by our circumstances. So our financial circumstances, our socioeconomic circumstances, where we live, but there’s about 40% that is in 100% our control, so there are controllable factors. And so there is no doubt that if you are struggling financially, and I know during COVID we had lots of people losing jobs, but just from an equity perspective, you still have 40% that’s in your control on your day-to-day activities, in your day-to-day actions. And there’s a lot of research about happiness and money. And John, you probably know more about that than I do being an economist. And I don’t know if this is still the case, I know at one point, they said that as long as your overall needs are met, that any additional financial gain doesn’t necessarily bring happiness, I have since read things that are kind of saying the opposite.

John: The original research on thst was a little bit flawed in that it was treating the impact of additional income as being a linear effect, so that $1,000 increase in income would have the same effect on someone whose income was $10,000 a year as it would for someone who was making $1.5 million a year. And it turned out that for higher incomes, the same dollar increase did not yield as much of an effect. However, once they use a log transformation and they looked at percentage changes that broke down. And it turned out that, in most of the studies that I’ve seen, it’s a percent change in income which matters. So it takes much more income to make a really wealthy person happier than it does for a poor person. But when you allow for that, income seems to be extremely important, but also so does relative income. Because, in general, when societies become wealthier, people often will revert back to their original happiness when there’s a sudden change in income. But in general, at any given time, an increase in income, will improve happiness, but it’s the percent increase in income that seems to matter the most.

Amy: That definitely makes sense, and one of the things that we study in this human flourishing realm is the hedonic treadmill. And so this hedonic treadmill really kind of gets at what you were just saying, and from a financial perspective, and going back to your original question, from a financial perspective, money can buy happiness in a sense, where if it’s pouring rain out, and I have to walk to campus versus getting an Uber. If I have the money to get an Uber, then I’m going to be happier, because now I’m not soaking wet. But what this hedonic treadmill says is this kind of setpoint that we have, so we get a new job, and we get a 20% increase in a raise, we are happier for a momentary period of time, but we go back down to that setpoint. And that setpoint might be a little higher now, because our financial status has changed. But it’s that whole idea of keeping up with the Joneses. If we start to make more money, we live in different areas we associate possibly with different people, and so now your setpoint has actually increased. But does your happiness correlate with that? And research says no, because you get back down to that set point where, “Okay, it’s great, I got a 20% raise, but now I want this $100,000 car instead of the $40,000 car.” And so we’re constantly reaching for that next best thing. And if we look at it from that perspective, it doesn’t matter what your financial situation is, it doesn’t change the fact that you have control over 40% of your happiness on a day-to-day basis. And the research has shown that it’s the small wins that you have every day that create more happiness than these larger wins, where I just was promoted to tenure, or I just got this new car, that space that brings you back down, whereas our every day strategies that we can use is what really going to make a difference. So again, that’s in our control. And it’s really unrelated to our financial or socioeconomic status. Because, again, if we use example of getting up in the morning and staying off social media, that has nothing to do with anything other than your controllable factors.

John: And also, as individuals, we’re not going to be able to eliminate the inequities in our society, but we can perhaps try to make lives better for ourselves and for the people around us, including our students.

Amy: And I think of the negativity bias as soon as you said that, because I can think of a handful of students where when they tell me their stories, I want to cry, because they’re so deep, and they’re so intense, and they struggle so much, and where they are, I just want to give them a hug because I’m so proud of where they are. But what makes one person who’s from the exact same background struggle when somebody else from that exact same situation thrives and is resilient. And I think a lot of it’s this negativity bias where you come into your space, your classroom, wherever it is, with this thought of “Woe is me, I’ve been given these bad circumstances, I’m not going to thrive. I can’t do this.” Whereas another individual that has those same circumstances walks into the room and says, “I am so grateful for this opportunity, I am going to take full advantage of it and thrive in this community.” And so I think that’s really where we get into this individualistic change in response.

Rebecca: And I think that there is that community aspect that you’re mentioning too of relationships or just how your emotional state at any given time does impact the people around you, because they’re responding to that emotional state.

Amy: Yeah, I think of all those times that I have that unfortunate poor student that decides to walk in my office right after I read a nasty email, I’m like, “Oh, man, I don’t want to take this out on you, but you’re just my first person that walks through the door.”

Rebecca: I’m sure there’s much of that that happens that we are unaware of, but maybe could be become more aware of and actively take action on.

John: You mentioned earlier issues with mobile devices and with social media. And this is one of those issues we see in our classes where students may be continuously using these things, while they perceive themselves as being focused on class as well. And yet there is a fair amount of research dealing with our ability to multitask. How do you address that with your students?

Amy: Well, I used to take the approach that probably most faculty took, which was no cell phone. Well, obviously, that doesn’t work. Because although they think they’re sneaky, they’re still sneaking them out. I have gone with more of a passive aggressive approach, which I’m actually finding is working pretty well. And it’s not passive aggressive, but in a sense, it is. I explain to them this concept of multitasking, and that you can’t multitask. If I’m speaking to you, you can’t be doing anything else. And so I go with, if you are not 100% engaged in my class, or want to be engaged in my class, you shouldn’t be here. And what I mean by that is, if you are going to check that text message, that immediately means that you’re not multitasking, which means you don’t find this classroom important enough to you. So don’t be here, I’ve yet to have anyone leave. And I will be honest with you, they all literally put their phones away. And then I tell them about the research of, even if they have their cell phone laying on the table, because you know, you’ll tell them to put it away, and they just put it on the desk and flip it over. There’s research to show the anxiety that that cell phone brings to the person next to you. Because the stress that the individual has that’s sitting next to you is thinking, “Oh, when is that person going to pick up that phone? And when is that going to now distract me because I see them picking their phone up.” And so I kind of take that approach of you can’t multitask. And it actually has helped. I would like to throw faculty under the bus with this. When we’re in meetings on Zoom, can anybody literally say that we sit there and we’re giving 100% attention to our Zoom meeting? Or do we have another screen with email on it. We’ve all been there. It’s not increasing your ability to thrive, multitasking cannot work. And this is something as simple as when you talk with your significant other, you sit there and you put everything down, and you talk to them and you look them in the eye, and it’ll immediately increase your emotion.

Rebecca: Of course, we always have students that need devices for accommodation reasons, perhaps to take notes and things or maybe a student has children and they’re sick, and you’re kind of monitoring. So there are occasions where we’re forced into multitasking, even though we know it’s not the best situation. But making people aware of how that might distract or impact others can be really helpful. I know one strategy I’ve used is encouraging people that need to be monitoring or using their devices to be more on the periphery so that they’re not right next to someone where it might be distracting,

Amy: …or cell phone breaks. I know teachers that will do a text break, a two-minute text break. I haven’t done that. And to go back to what you said, Rebecca, I have one or two times actually answered my daughter on my watch in the middle of class because if my daughter is calling me in the middle of the day, something’s wrong. I get that. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I do have to say that some of my highest productivity is during zoom meetings, when I can actually get some work done without other interruptions.

Amy: I agree, John, I so want to agree with you. And I so, so do it. So this is one of those things, do as I say, not as I do. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Well, it may be that you’re just focused on the other task, right? And the other thing’s just background noise. [LAUGHTER]

Amy: That’s it. That‘s definitely it.

Rebecca: You’re not really multitasking, you’re just tasking with the illusion that you’re doing two things.

John: Right. So our names are up on the screen. And it looks like we’re focused if we have the cameras on.

Amy: …except when you see your eyes, the eyes drop because you could tell you’re reading the email lower.

John: or one of the resources shared by the presenter. [LAUGHTER]

Amy: Of course.

John: That’s a good excuse to do that.

Amy: There we go.

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

Amy: What’s next? I have amazing stuff that’s coming up down the pike. I am in the midst of creating a brand new course called Thrive, which I actually I have been offering. And it’s 100% about positive psychology, it’s actually a seven-week course. And each week, we do a different aspect of PERMA-V. And I’m hoping to offer that to as many students as possible. But I’m also in the thought process in my brain of putting together some sort of training type thing to help individual faculty learn some of these strategies. And that training will probably start with a spring CELTworkshop that I might do during breakout in the spring of how to actually take what we just talked about and give you substantial resources that you can actually use. So I’m in the process of having a student work with me right now to create a website that has just drop down menus of all the resources so that people can just pull right from that and say, “Let’s do this today.”

Rebecca: Sounds like a great resource to look forward to. Thanks for joining us, Amy.

Amy: Thank you. This was great.

John: It’s always great talking to 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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272. Mind Over Monsters

During the last few years, college students have been reporting mental health concerns at unprecedented levels, straining the resources provided by college and university counseling centers. In this episode, Sarah Rose Cavanagh joins us to discuss the role that faculty can play in addressing these concerns.

Sarah is a psychologist, professor and Senior Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at Simmons University. She is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion and Hivemind: Thinking Alike in a Divided World as well as numerous academic articles and essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lit Hub, Inside Higher Ed, and Vice. Her most recent book, Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge will be released in spring 2023.

Show Notes

  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the college classroom with the science of emotion. West Virginia University Press.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2019). Hivemind: The new science of tribalism in our divided world. Grand Central Publishing.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (forthcoming, 2023). Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. Beacon Press.
  • Elizabeth Romero
  • Ryan Glode
  • Reacting to the Past
  • Jasmin Veerapen
  • Gary Senecal
  • Miller, L. (2020). Why Fish Don’t Exist: a story of loss, love, and the hidden order of life. Simon & Schuster.
  • Robert Sapolsky’s Publications
  • Auel, J. M. (2002). The Clan of the Cave Bear. Bantam.
  • Kelly Leonard
  • Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-Rich Education: How human connections drive success in college. JHU Press.
  • Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan
  • Michele Lemons
  • James Lang

Transcript

John: During the last few years, college students have been reporting mental health concerns at unprecedented levels, straining the resources provided by college and university counseling centers. In this episode, we discuss the role that faculty can play in addressing these concerns.

[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.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Sarah Rose Cavanagh. Sarah is a psychologist, professor and Senior Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at Simmons University. She is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion and Hivemind: Thinking Alike in a Divided World as well as numerous academic articles and essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lit Hub, Inside Higher Ed, and Vice. Her most recent book, Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge will be released in spring 2023.

Welcome back, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

John: Today’s teas are:… Sarah, are you drinking any tea?

Sarah: No, I always disappoint you. I am yet again drinking coffee.

Rebecca: Yet again, such a stable person in our lives with your coffee. [LAUGHTER] I have blue sapphire tea.

Sarah: That’s a pretty name.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s tasty. And my new favorite.

John: And I am drinking spring cherry green tea here in the midst of winter in upstate New York. We’ve invited you here today to discuss Mind over Monsters. Could you talk a little bit about the origin of this project?

Sarah: For me, I think writing is more organic than it is planned, and so it felt a little bit like the book decided it needed to be written, rather than I decided to write the book. There was just such a groundswell of interest around young adult’s mental health, people talking about it, podcasts, books. And I am a college professor, I’m a psychologist, I am an educational developer. I’m the mom of an adolescent, and so I couldn’t help but be concerned and interested in this topic. And I also felt that, as someone who has struggled with anxiety my entire life, panic disorder in particular, that I had some small bits of wisdom from my lived experiences to share. And so it just all came together.

John: How prevalent are mental health issues among youth today?

Sarah: They’re pretty prevalent, unfortunately. Some people have even labeled it an epidemic. For instance, in 2021, three of the major American organizations dedicated to youth and adolescent mental health joined together and declared a national state of emergency, which was an unprecedented move. And they cited in particular the effects of the pandemic and the fact that already marginalized groups along lines of race and ethnicity, gender, and sexuality and income were bearing the brunt of the psychological effects of the pandemic. But also there’s a lot of complexities surrounding figuring out whether rates have truly changed or whether there’s also changes in stigma surrounding mental health, which are laudatory changes, we want people not to feel stigma, and to come out and reach out for treatment. There’s also changes in the thresholds of the diagnoses themselves, they shift every several years. And there’s also changes in people’s willingness to seek treatment, and also their decisions about the level at which they might need treatment. And so there’s some evidence that a lot of these complexities may be making epidemics seem worse than it is. But what is clear is that more young adults and especially college students are expressing more distress and asking for help with that distress. Counseling centers on campus are absolutely overwhelmed and students are expressing a lot of frustration with not receiving the level and the timing of care that they need in those settings, and so clearly, we need changes.

Rebecca: In a lot of public conversations, we’re hearing debates about needing to show compassion to adolescents who are struggling, but then also others who argue that youth is too coddled. Can you talk a little bit about what you would advocate for?

Sarah: And that’s a delightfully easy setup for me, [LAUGHTER] because in the subtitle of the book is “compassionate challenge and why we need to support youth mental health with compassionate challenge.” And I argue that this debate and tension between compassion and challenge is one of these false dichotomies that we human beings seem to adore. [LAUGHTER] Students clearly need compassion, and I think compassion has to come first. For me, what that looks like is establishing classroom communities and learning environments on campus that are characterized by safety and by a feeling of belongingness. You need to feel safe enough to take risks. And you need to feel that you’re supported not just by your instructor, but also your fellow students and the Student Success Office and all of the people on campus. But once we’ve established that grounding and that safe setting, then I think to truly learn and grow, we do need to take risks, we do need to step outside our comfort zones, and we need to be challenged. And I think that challenge can be very positive. I spend one of the last chapters of the book really digging into the science of play, and how play is all about being vulnerable and taking risks and play can be scary. And you can only play in settings where you, again, feel safe. And I think, finally, what I call compassionate challenge isn’t just important for teaching and learning. As I draw out in two interviews with clinical psychologists Ryan Glode and Elly Romero, compassionate challenge is also really key to addressing anxiety and symptoms of mental health. And I don’t think we’re going to be doing any therapy in the classroom, but learning environments marked by compassionate challenge are ones that are consistent with principles that help address and resolve anxiety, which again, involves facing your fears, and environments where you’re technically safe and there’s a facilitator there to help you manage those risks.

Rebecca: John and I were talking earlier about some of the things that I had observed in my own classroom in the last year with an increase in desire for perfection, like kind of perfectionism or anxiety around not being perfect and not being right and working with students in class and trying to find ways to help students work through that so that they could take risks or could show things in progress to get feedback so that they could continue to improve. Can you talk a little bit more about what that might look like in a classroom?

Sarah: Well, I think that a lot of that brings up assessment and grading. And I think why we see that perfectionism in the classroom is that students are very concerned about their grades, because they believe, to some extent rightly, that their grades are going to translate into future security, and to getting into the right graduate school or getting the right job. And we do this to students. In high school, we train them to be so focused on the grades in order to get into the correct college and I have a high schooler and her grades are constantly just streaming, coming in in real time to her phone. And then we’re surprised when students get to college and they’re too focused on their grades. [LAUGHTER] And so I think that helping students with that need for perfection is probably reforming our grading systems so that there isn’t that need, that that focus on perfectionism isn’t necessarily rewarded in the same way. And instead, we’re rewarding taking risks and doing something creative, and maybe failing and having multiple iterations of something and seeing that work can grow over time, which, I think, amplifies creativity

Rebecca: There’s a lot more focus on process than on the product, then.

Sarah: Yes.

John: You mentioned using play in classrooms, what would be an example of the use of play in the classroom?

Sarah: Well, I think you can directly play through using improv, and especially in the early parts of the semester when you’re all getting to know each other, a lot of icebreakers are very playful. And community building can be very playful. I think there are ways like the whole reacting to the past role playing approach in history. You can easily roleplay in literature classes. So I think you can directly play. I think that what play can also be is almost like a philosophy or a stance that you take, that what we’re doing in the classroom is not dire. And, related to the grading that we were just talking about, there aren’t large stakes, that what we’re doing here is this is kind of a sandbox, where we’re playing with intellectual ideas, we’re testing things out, we’re experimenting. And there’s a sense in which it’s lighthearted, even when the topics are not light hearted, I think that we can take this lighthearted stance with our students. And I think also mixing things up and not getting too into routines, can also be playful. And I feel like I have a lot of tricks in my teaching bag, different discussion techniques and ways of getting us up and moving and things like that. But there’s always a point, kind of through the three-quarter mark of the semester, where they’ve seen it all. And so I try to save one or two things for that point in the semester and kind of throw everything out the window and do something entirely different. And I think that that can be playful as well. And so I don’t think that play in the classroom is all about things that we think of as play proper, like improv and roleplay; it can also be all of these other techniques.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve studied in the past is play. And one of the things that’s interesting about play is that there’s rules and there’s structure. And so a lot of times we think that play is just chaos, but actually play almost always has rules. They might not be formal rules, they might be informal rules. But that’s a way that people can feel safe and able to play is that they understand what the structure is and what the rules are.

Sarah: Those are great points.

Rebecca: You think that it’s hard to facilitate because it might seem so foreign, but actually we’re all very familiar with play. And it is actually incredibly structured. We know that structured things can be really inclusive. And so you might be hesitant to try something that seems like it might be unstructured, but I think, lo and behold, play is actually structured.

Sarah: Yeah, and a lot of those classic improv activities have strict rules in fact and one of the rules is that there’s a kindness.So, even when animals play… you know, I watch dogs play a lot at dog parks, and it can get quite vicious looking, but the animals are safe, you don’t harm each other and that is a strict rule of play as well.

John: Some of this book is drawn from research you conducted as part of the Student Voices project. Could you tell us a little bit about that project?

Sarah: Absolutely. So this was a project that grew out of my last grant from the Davis Educational Foundation. I had done a quantitative study that I talked with you all about in the past. And we had some funds left. And I had an honor student, Jasmin Veerapen, who’s now at Columbia, getting her social work degree, and she needed an honors thesis project. And so we collaborated together and ran a qualitative follow up and interviewed students from 35 different very diverse types of institutions across the country. And it was not a project focused explicitly on mental health, but on emotions and learning. So for instance, the first two questions we asked of all of our participants was: What was the best learning experience you have had in college, and tell us all about it?” And the second was, “What was one of the worst learning experiences you had in college?” ..and their insights are all so rich, and I share a number of their wonderful stories in the book. It’s a great pleasure.

John: Would that be something that you’d encourage faculty to do in their own classes?

Sarah: Yes, it was very illustrative, a lot came out of that. And we actually had worked with a consultant, Gary Senecal, because this was my first qualitative research study, and so I didn’t really know what I was doing. And he’s done a lot of qualitative research, and so he was our consultant. And he helped us shape the questions. And I think he had a large role in shaping those first two questions, because they’re just open ended enough that students share very different things, but then they all coalesce, and so it was very informative. And I think many professors could learn a lot asking their students those questions.

Rebecca: You included many narratives throughout your book, some of your own personal stories and some of the stories of student voices from this project. Can you talk about why you decided to include narrative as a part of the book?

Sarah: Yes, when I think about the books that I most like to read, the nonfiction books that I most like to read, they have a really strong narrative component. So I recently read Why Fish Don’t Exist, which was one of my favorite reads out of the last few years. And I love Robert Sapolsky’s books, and I’m a story person. And I mostly read fiction. And so I really enjoy nonfiction that has a strong narrative component. So that was one of my motivations, that I wanted to write a book that was like the books that I like to read. I think that story, though, also is really compelling. I think that there are insights that are embedded in stories that things like quantitative data can’t always tap into in the same way. And I think in particular, for topics like this, and for emotions and for students’ perceptions of their own learning, I think that we need story.

John: In addition to narrative, which is really compelling in your book, you also bring in a number of other disciplinary studies. Could you talk a little bit about some of the other disciplines and some of the other research your book relies on

Sarah: That’s a little, maybe, too far into humanities, I’m a little worried. I am a social scientist by training. And I’m very aware of the fact that there is disciplinary expertise. But I do bring in a lot of humanity’s work, in particular monster theory. So I read quite a bit of monster theory, which wasn’t even something that I knew existed before then, but that’s in there. I do something that I get from my mother. I used to make fun of my mother for always citing literature and stories as evidence for things. I would take an anthropology class and come home from college, and we would talk about it. And she would shake her head at me and say, “Well, that’s not how it happened, in Clan of the Cave Bear. [LAUGHTER] But I do a little bit about that. So I bring in some stories from novels and short stories that I think illustrate the points that I’m trying to make as well. And then I think, most compellingly, I bring in actual experts from their disciplines. So I interview a sociologist about her research on trigger warnings. I interview a Latin American Studies scholar about his work on vocation, which I found so fascinating. And I also interviewed a couple of clinicians, as I said, and Kelly Leonard who is a Second City improv person, and so I bring in those other disciplines through the lens of the people I’m interviewing.

Rebecca: Sometimes it’s really helpful to have these illustrations because statistics can go only so far in helping us understand what that actually looks like and feels like in our classrooms or in the experience that students are having because we can feel really far removed… or I’m feeling farther and farther removed [LAUGHTER] from students and it helps to hear things in their own voices. And we don’t always ask them enough. I wish we asked more.

John: …which is something really troubling to those of us who focus mostly on statistical analyses, and so forth. [LAUGHTER] But it’s true, a compelling story can be much more effective in convincing people of some concept than any number of studies that you might present to them.

Sarah: But we do have lots of citations for people like you, John. But I tried to bring both sources to the table,

Rebecca: …which is good, because you got both of us here.

Sarah: Mm hmm.

Rebecca: So can you talk a little bit about the intended audience of your book?

Sarah: Absolutely. My primary audience, I think, is people who are doing the work of higher education, so college instructors, staff like me who work in teaching centers, and student success offices, administrators, and so it does have a strong higher ed thread throughout. That said, I don’t think there’s a super bright line between especially late high school and early college in some of these concerns. And I think it could be useful for high school educators, especially those who might be advising students about the college selection process. I think that there is some insight and some sections, maybe, that could be of interest to college students themselves, and possibly their parents. But I would want them to know that it’s not a parenting book. I don’t want anyone to pick it up thinking it’s a parenting book. There’s long sections, again, on trigger warnings and institutions needing to actually carry out their DE&I statements. And someone picking it up thinking they’re going to get some pithy advice about parenting is not going to be satisfied.

John: Would this be a good focus for faculty reading groups or book clubs?

Sarah: I think so. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: We think so too. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, it looks like, yeah, it looks like some really wonderful topics that you’re exploring to think about all of higher ed in a lot of ways, and perhaps some reimagining that needs to happen.

Sarah: Oh, thank you.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what we, as educators or people working in higher ed, can do to create a more compassionate and challenging environment for our students? What are some actions we can take?

Sarah: Well, I think you have to do the compassion piece first. And I think that colleges really need to be examining, and I think they are examining, there’s lots of other people sharing this message of compassion and relationship, rich education, thinking of Peter Felton and Leo Lambert’s book. And I think that we need to embed compassion in the atmosphere in the classroom and the dorms. I think that we need to pay a lot of attention to community. I think that we need to shore up resources in counseling centers. I’ve been attending, as part of the research for this book, lots of webinars with people who are looking at this topic from a lot of different frameworks. And there’s a lot of interesting work being done on peer support, which I’m both interested in and also wary of. I think that peers are our natural first source of support. And that peer support could be really life changing for a lot of college students. But just like we shouldn’t be doing therapy in the classroom, I don’t think it’s the responsibility of college students to do counseling for their fellow peers. And they’re trained to spot warning signs and to do the kind of heavy lifting that a lot of counseling involves. And so I think that we’re going to need to dedicate more resources to trained clinicians in our counseling centers. In my interview with Ryan Glode in the book, who is, again, a clinical counseling psychologist, he really feels that counseling centers provide just sort of venting sorts of therapy, and that he’s a strong advocate of cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy, and that students need much more individualized treatment and approaches. And so I think that that’s an interesting thing to explore. And the last thing I would say is, I always say this, but faculty need more support and time, because there’s been a lot of great essays coming out, the last couple of weeks even I’ve seen, about the fact that student success is really faculty success, and faculty are where students get more of their support than anywhere else. And we can try to reach out to them in many different ways, but they land in our classrooms, we know that we’ll see them in their classrooms, even if they’re not leaving their dorm much, they usually come to class. And so it’s an entry point. Mentoring is such a strong part of the college experience and so wonderful for growth and mental health. And so I think that for faculty to really apply all of this and have really close student relationships and really rich classrooms and all of these things, they need more time and more support. And so I think that the two places I would put my support is in the counseling center and then in supporting faculty, giving them the kinds of time and the kinds of support that will allow them to be the teachers that they can be when they have the time to do so.

Rebecca: Are there specific places where you found compassion to be lacking that surprised you in your research? We know that there’s a [LAUGHTER] strain on counseling centers, but were there some other places that really rose to really needing some attention,

Sarah: None of the students we talked to had trouble coming up with either a best or worst learning experience. And the good ones are really, really good. And the poor ones were pretty poor. And so there’s a lot of unevenness, I think, and I think that that, when I talk as I just did about, if you just give faculty more time, then they’ll blossom, and then the students will blossom, and sometimes when I have conversations with administrators about that, or see policies being enacted on different campuses, I can tell that there’s a wariness that if you give faculty time, they’ll just either do more research, or they will check out and that there’s a danger there and we need to work faculty harder. And I do see in talking to the students about their best and worst learning experiences, that the people teaching those worst learning experiences really need to step up their game a little bit. And so I think that there are those pockets out there that still don’t apply themselves to their teaching or look at it as an onerous responsibility. But the good teachers are really fantastic. And so maybe leveling that out a little bit, bringing the worst learning experiences up to the best learning experiences might be somewhere I recommend some attention.

John: One of the areas where people often see a dichotomy between compassion and challenge is in terms of deadlines in courses where material later in the course build on material earlier in the course, it’s really easy for students who are struggling to get further and further behind when they don’t have at least some sort of a deadline. Do you have any strategies for addressing that, besides focusing on the learning rather than on grades? What can we do to help ensure that students make regular progress while still maintaining compassion?

Sarah: Um hmm. I think this is the question of the moment. [LAUGHTER] And I can tell you, I just had a conversation with a reporter at The Chronicle who was writing a whole big piece on just this issue. And we at Simmons just met with our advisory council, who are a group of about 12 faculty who we check in with about what faculty needs are. And this was their number one answer, like clearly. So we’re going to do a panel in the spring at Simmons, where we have some faculty with very different perspectives. We’re hoping to draw out some of these tensions and have this discussion. And so I do think it’s an excellent question. And I think that a deadline is a good example of where compassionate challenge needs to be. I think that all of us need the structure of deadlines. I myself benefit [LAUGHTER] greatly from the structure of deadlines and schedules. And I think especially for college students in the early years, if they’re so-called traditionally aged students, some of the process of those first year or two of college is learning time management and in scaffolding them into good time management. And so I think that structure is very important. As Rebecca was saying earlier, it’s also an inclusive teaching strategy, Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan have written extensively about that. But I think without compassion, deadlines are going to worsen student anxiety, and also it doesn’t make a lot of sense for contemporary life. And so some techniques that I’ve seen are things like using frequent tokens instead of just no deadlines or 100% flexibility with deadlines and things kind of pile up toward the end. You can have tokens where students can have a set number of missed assignments, or dropped assignments, or I need an extra week or two. I think that it’s important in whatever you do, if you are going to be flexible to be transparent with all of the students about it, because I think that some students will ask for flexibility and the other students won’t know that they can ask for flexibility. And a lot of that falls out along the lines where everything falls out and creates inequities. So I think that having some structure, but with some flexibility built in is probably the best way to go. I was interviewing a biology instructor for a different project. And she was telling me what she did is she had pretty close to unlimited flexibility within modules. So she had her whole semester set up in modules, but then you had to submit things within that module, because as you say, especially some fields, the information builds, and if you miss part, you’re going to be in trouble. And so I thought that was another interesting approach. But I agree that in particular when we’re thinking about mental health, that structure is better. And the last thing I’ll say is that at my previous campus, we had a panel of the Dean of first-year students, it was the head of our accessibility office, the head of our counseling center, and then a clinical counseling psychologist from our psychology department about issues surrounding student mental health. And one of the instructors asked about deadlines, and they were all unanimous, they said, deadlines are necessary. The worst thing you can do for a student high in anxiety is allow no deadlines or submissions whenever they like, because that will quickly get them into a negative place, and that they need that structure. So I think it’s a great example of the need for both compassion and challenge.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think about when I hear structure or certain kinds of support is routine. And you talked a little earlier about having some routine, but then disruptions to that routine. Can you talk about why some of the disruptions to the routine might be important, or why not having a routine all the time could be helpful for students?

Sarah: Well, I think the positives of routine are that they’re reassuring, for one thing. I think we all as human beings, it’s relaxing to settle into a routine, and it’s also lower in cognitive load. If you just know, okay, every Thursday, I have a homework assignment, every Tuesday I have a quiz, you don’t have to constantly be scrambling and figuring things out every week. And so I think that routines can be reassuring, and they can also be more transparent and easier to follow along. I think where the disruption is great is it re-energizes. So it’s great to be reassured and calm things down. But then that can get boring and kind of stultifying after a little while. And so once you have established the routine to mix things up once in a while, I think, can be re-energizing. And so I think that’s where a blend of the two can be really powerful.

Rebecca: You mentioned that you do this in your own classes. Can you share an example of one of the ways you mix things up in your own class,

Sarah: it’s not terribly exciting. But the one that I do this most clearly is in my motivation and emotion class. And in that class, we’re covering different topics and we’re reading research articles and doing presentations. And again, I try to mix things up, but I have a set number of things that I mix things up. And then usually right after Thanksgiving, I throw everything out the window and we just spend a week doing something different. And so we used to watch a movie together. And then we would write an essay about the motivation and emotion aspects and the themes that we’ve talked about all semester long, how it played out in those characters lives. And I was showing Lars and the Real Girl, I don’t know if it’s kind of an older movie now and stopped doing that for a while for a number of reasons. But then more recently, in this activity called “making the world a better place.” And I had a selection of psychological science articles, each one that tackled a societal problem, like climate change, or misinformation, and how we could use principles from recent psychological science research and to help improve this societal conundrum. And then we did small group work with snacks. And they would work on little group presentations all together that were very low stakes, and then present them to each other. And we would have a grant competition among them. But it was just this week where the routine was very different.

Rebecca: It sounds like almost a culminating point of the semester, instead of ramping up stress with a big project, it’s ramping down the stress with something that’s applied, but in a more low key way.

John: …but also valuable and fun.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. To me, it sounds like: “[LOUD EXHALE]”

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

Sarah: Well, I have a new grant. Well, a semi-new grant. And it’s a National Science Foundation Incubator Grant with my co-PI, Michele Lemons of Assumption University. And it is examining assessment, feedback, and grading in undergraduate bio education in particular. And so we had a qualitative portion, we had a survey portion, and we had student interviews, and we’ve just wrapped data collection, So I have a lot of writing and meaning-making and analysis, and then a full proposal grant [LAUGHTER] to write. So on the research side, that’s what’s going on. And on the writing side, I don’t know yet. I have a few possible ideas. I’m in a writers group with Jim Lang, who I know you both know, and his new book, which is going to be fantastic… and you have to have him on the show… is all about how academics can successfully write trade books for a wider audience. And I’ve been enjoying the chapters as he’s been writing them. And I was reading his chapter on where to get your book idea, and I realized that I’ve written a couple of books now from my expertise, but I don’t have to stick with my expertise. I could do something super fun. And so I don’t know.

John: Not that your expertise isn’t fun or interesting. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Well, thank you. And anything I write will obviously have a strong psychology component, it’s just like in my bones at this point. But yeah, so stay tuned. We’ll see.

Rebecca: Sounds like some exciting things down the pike for sure.

John: We look forward to hearing more about that when you’re ready to share that.

Sarah: Oh, thanks.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you.

Sarah: Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Rebecca: Yeah, I always learn stuff from our conversations, so I’m looking forward to having you on again in the future.

Sarah: Oh, thanks. Same.

[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.

[MUSIC]

270. Fall 2022 Reflection

The time between semesters is a good time to engage in reflective practice. In this episode, we take a look back at our teaching practices and student learning during the Fall 2022 semester as we prepare for the spring 2023 semester.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: The time between semesters is a good time to engage in reflective practice. In this episode, we take a look back at our teaching practices and student learning during the Fall 2022 semester as we prepare for the spring 2023 semester.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

John: We’re recording this at the end of 2022. We thought we’d reflect back on our experiences during the fall 2022 semester. Our teas today are:

Rebecca: I have blue sapphire tea once again, because it’s my new favorite. And I have discovered that the blue part are blue cornflowers. That’s what’s in it. So it’s black tea with blue cornflowers.

John: And I have a spring cherry green tea, which is a particularly nice thing to be having on this very cold wintry day in late December, in a blue Donna the Buffalo mug, which is one of my favorite bands.

Rebecca: We had a few things that John and I talked about ahead of time that we thought would be helpful to reflect on and one of them is our campus, like many SUNYs, is in the process of transitioning their learning management systems. And we did move to Brightspace for the fall semester. So how’d it go for you, John?

John: For the most part, it went really well. Returning students were really confused for about a week as they learned how to navigate it. But overall, it went really smoothly, it helped, I think, that I had taught a class last summer in Brightspace, so I was already pretty comfortable with it. But, in general, it had a really nice clean look and feel, it brings in intelligent agents where we can send reminders to students of work that’s coming up that’s due, reminding them of work that they’ve missed that they can still do, and just in general, automating a lot of tasks so that it seemed a bit more personalized for students. And that was particularly helpful in a class with 360 students. And also, it has some nice features for personalization, where you can have replacement strings, so you can have announcements that will put their name right up at the top or embedded in the announcement. And that seemed to be really helpful. One other feature in it is it has a checklist feature, which my students, periodically throughout the term and at the end of the term, said they really found helpful because it helped them keep track of what work they had to do each week.

Rebecca: Yeah, I used the checklist feature quite a bit, because I have pretty long term projects that are scaffolded and have a number of parts. And so I was using the checklists to help students track where they were in a project and make sure they were documenting all of the parts that needed to be documented along the way. I think generally students liked the look and feel of this learning management system better. But I also found that I was using some of the more advanced features and a lot of their other faculty were not. And so that difference in skill level of faculty using the interface, I think, impacted how students were experiencing it. And that if their experience was varied, they struggled a bit more, because it was just different from class to class. So I know that students struggled a bit with that. But it was also my first time teaching in that particular platform. From a teaching perspective, I think it went well. I found it, for the most part, easy to use and I like the way it looked. But students and I definitely went back and forth a few times about where to put some things or how it could be more useful to them. And we just negotiated that throughout the semester to improve their experience. So I think that was really helpful.

John: You mentioned some of the more advanced features, what were some of the advanced features that you used?

Rebecca: Yeah, I mean, I used the checklist, which not a lot of students had in some of their other classes. I know you used it, but I don’t think a lot of faculty were using those. I had released content, just I know you also use some of these things, too, but a lot of other faculty were just like, “Here’s the content. Here’s your quiz.” …and kind of kept it pretty simple. But I teach a stacked class, so I had some things that were visible to some students and not to other students. Occasionally I’d make a mistake there, so that caused confusion.

John: And by a stacked class, you meant there’s some undergraduates and some graduate students taking the same course but having different requirements?

Rebecca: Yeah, and also different levels. So within both the undergraduate and graduate students, I’ve beginning students and advanced students. So there’s really kind of four levels of students in the same class.

John: It does sound a bit challenging…

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: …especially on your side.

Rebecca: Yeah. So it’s easy to sometimes make mistakes, which can certainly result in confusion. I think students were also just trying to figure out the best way to find stuff like whether or not to look at it from a calendar point of view, or from a module point of view. They were just trying to negotiate what worked best for them. And there were some syncing issues between the app and what they were doing with checklists in particular. So it caused a lot of confusion at the beginning, but we figured out what it was and that helped. So new things, new technical challenges result in some learning curves. But I think, throughout this semester, we worked through those things and students were much more comfortable by the end of the semester.

John: And by next semester it should be quite comfortable for pretty much all students.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: So what went well for you, in this past semester?

Rebecca: I had a couple of really good assignments. Some of them were experimental. [LAUGHTER] I wasn’t really sure how they were gonna go and I was pleasantly surprised. One practice I continued, that continues to go well, is using warm ups at the beginning of my class for design and creativity. And that seems to continue to be very helpful for students. I teach longer class periods than a typical class because it’s a studio. And so transitioning into that space was helpful for students, and also starting to teach them ways to foster creativity when they feel very stressed or have a lot of other things tugging on their minds they also reported was very useful to just learn some strategies. We did things about prioritization, creativity, planning, related to the projects that we were doing. So that continued to be really useful. And then I did a brand new project that I’ve never done before. And the work was fantastic for the most part. I collaborated with our campus Special Collections and Archives. And we made a couple sets of archives available to students that were digitized. And then my students created online exhibitions and focused on that experience, so that it’s not just “Here is five things,” [LAUGHTER] but rather like it’s a curated experience that had kind of exploratory pieces of it. And that went really well, students got really curious about the materials in the archives. These are students who maybe have never really took advantage of these kinds of library resources before and started to learn how to dig into understanding these primary sources better as well. So that was really exciting.

John: What topics were the archives related to?

Rebecca: There were two collections. One of them was a scrapbook from the early 1900s that had a lot of example trade cards, or industry cards, and advertisements. And so in a design class that became interesting materials to look at. And then another collection was digital postcards from the area. So they were looking at the city of Oswego and the campus at different time periods. And they found that to be kind of interesting. And there’s others that we’d like, but we went with ones that were [LAUGHTER] primarily digitized already, to make it a little easier.

John: And what did they do with those?

Rebecca: They had to pick a collection they wanted to use. And then they had to select at least 10 pieces from that collection, come up with a theme or some sort of storyline that they wanted to tell about those objects, and then they had to create this online experience. So they created websites, essentially, that had interactive components. And there were a wide range of topics. One student did something on women’s roles in the early 1900s through media. Another student focused on like then and now. So they took the postcards and then they went and took their own photos of those same places and did some comparisons with some maps and things. Some that were telling the history of the institution, which was kind of interesting. The history of boating in the area. So people picked things that were of interest. Snow was a big topic [LAUGHTER] … there’s a couple students that did things about snow and documentation of snow over time. But they were good, they were really interesting works. And we’re looking to get those up in a shared OER format. We’re getting close on being able to get that and share that out, but we’re hoping to deposit a copy of the projects as a unified whole back to the archives and then have them live online as well.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: How about you, John? I know you were continuing your podcast project.

John: In my online class, which is smaller, it’s limited to 40 students, it worked really well this time. One thing that was different is that nearly all of my online students were genuinely non-traditional students. They were mostly older, by older I mean in their late 20s, early 30s. And they were just very well motivated and hardworking, and the class in general performed extremely well. They got all their work done on time, they were actively engaged in the discussions, and they really enjoyed creating the podcast in ways that I hadn’t seen as universally in past classes. Several of them mentioned that they were really apprehensive about it at first, but it turned out to be a really fun project. Because it’s an online class, they didn’t generally get to talk to other students, but they worked asynchronously in small groups, typically groups of two or three, on these podcasts and it gave them a chance to connect and talk to other students that they wouldn’t normally have outside of discussion boards in an online class. And they really appreciated that. And they really appreciated hearing the voices of the other students in the class. So that worked especially well.

Rebecca: I know you’ve also had, in some of your classes in the past few years, when there’s more online learning happening that maybe wouldn’t typically be a “distant learner” or someone who would choose to be online. And so this semester, you’re saying that the students who were in this class were actively choosing to be in an online class and that maybe made a difference.

John: They were students who generally were working full time and often, under really challenging circumstances were engaged in childcare, working full time, and taking three or four or five classes, sometimes working a couple of jobs. And yes, in the past, a large proportion of the students in online classes were, even before the pandemic, dorm students who weren’t always as well motivated as the students who were coming back to get a degree at a later stage of their life, who had a career and perhaps wanted to progress in that career. And during the pandemic, so many students were in online classes who really didn’t want to be there, it was a very different experience. So we moved past that now, or at least in my limited experience with a very small sample last semester, the students who were online were students who benefited greatly from being online and actively chose to be online. It’s a much better environment when students are able to take the modality that they most prefer to work in, for both them and for the instructor.

Rebecca: Yeah, then you’re not pulling people along who haven’t had that experience of taking an online class before, as well as trying to get them to do the work. Were there other practices or activities or other things that you employed in your class that worked particularly well this semester?

John: in general, I didn’t make too many major changes in the class because the transition to Brightspace alone was a bit of a challenge on my part, because it did require redoing pretty much all the materials in the class. But on both my large face-to-face class and my online class, I use PlayPosit videos to provide some basic instruction in the online class and to help facilitate a flipped class in my face-to-face class, where I have a series of typically two to five short videos each week in each course module with embedded questions. And students generally appreciated having those because they could go back and review them, they could go back and if they didn’t do too well on the embedded questions, they could go back and listen again or look at other materials, and then try it again. And basically, they had unlimited attempts at those and they appreciated that ability. Those were the things I think that probably went best. It was overall a challenging semester.

Rebecca: What was one of the biggest challenges you think you faced this semester as an instructor, John?

John: The two biggest challenges that I think are very closely related is… the class I was teaching both online and face to face is primarily a freshman level class, an introductory class… the variance in student backgrounds, particularly in math and the use of graphs is higher than I’ve ever seen it before. Some students came in with a very strong background, and some students came in with very limited ability and a great deal of fear about having to do anything involving even very basic algebra or arithmetic even. And it made it much more challenging than in previous semesters. And I think part of the issue is that we’ve seen some fairly dramatic differences in how school districts handled the pandemic. The learning losses were much smaller in well-resourced school districts, then in others that were more poorly resourced school districts in lower income communities. When schools had fewer resources and when the students in the schools had limited access to technology, and so forth, the shift to remote instruction had a much greater impact on those students. And that’s starting to show up at a level that I hadn’t seen in the first year and a half or so of the pandemic; it hit really hard this fall. And the other thing is that a lot of the work that was assigned outside of class simply wasn’t being done. I’ve never seen such high rates of non-completion of even very simple assignments, where students would have five or six multiple choice questions they had to answer after they completed a reading. And between a third and a half of the class just chose not to do it. It was very low stakes, they had unlimited attempts to do these things, but many of them just simply chose not to. And I ended up with many more students withdrawing from the class than I’ve ever seen before.

Rebecca: So I think there’s a couple interesting things maybe to dig into a little bit more. We’ve certainly seen students prior to the pandemic have a fixed mindset about math skills, for example. But when we have a deep fear of things, it’s really hard to learn. How have you helped students work through the fear? And is the fear rooted in just not coming prepared? Or is it a fear of trying something new?

John: It’s a bit of both. Because they already come in with a lot of anxiety, it makes it more challenging for them to try the work outside of class. And that’s part of the reason for the use of a flipped classroom setting in my large face-to-face class, because we go through problems in class. We’ve talked about this before, but much of my class time is spent giving students problems that they work on, first individually, and then they respond using the polling software that we use (iClicker cloud) and then they get a chance to try it again after talking to the people around them. So it’s sort of like a think-pair-share type arrangement where, if they don’t understand something, they get a chance to talk to other people who often will understand it a bit better. And in the second stage of that process, the results are always significantly higher after students have had a chance to talk about it, to work through their problems, and so on. So having that peer support is one of the main ways that I try to use to help students overcome the fear when they see that other students can do this and they can talk to other students who can explain it at a level appropriate for their level of understanding, that can work really well. And then we go through it as a whole class where I’ll call on students asking them to explain their solutions, or I’ll explain part of it if students are stuck on something, and doing some just-in-time teaching. And normally, what that does is it resolves a lot of that anxiety, and it helps people move forward. But that just wasn’t working quite as well this time. And I’m not quite sure why.

Rebecca: I think although I’m not using the same kind of format in my classes, a design studio really does rely a lot on collaborative feedback and [LAUGHTER] interacting with other students and coming to class prepared having done something outside of class, and then we have something to give feedback on and continue moving forward and troubleshoot and things together in class. So we’re using class time also to work through the hard stuff rather than outside of class. So the interesting thing about doing that in class, and really a lot of active learning techniques in class, is that it does depend on students coming prepared and having done something ahead of time. And if they’re not doing that ahead of time, it really changes what can or cannot be done in class. And the other thing that I experienced related to that is, some students just reported a deep fear in sharing things with other students that I’d really not experienced before. In the past, that’s always been a really positive experience. And those who get fully engaged in that continue to say it was a positive experience, but there were some who would actively avoid any of those opportunities to share their work. I don’t know why. I think there’s two things, there are some students that just were not doing things outside of class. So they were embarrassed or didn’t want to have their peers think that they didn’t know what was going on, or they didn’t want to reveal that they were behind. And then there’s another group of students who actually were overly prepared and did all the things, but they have a deep fear of being wrong or not being perfect. And there’s a lot of anxiety around that. And so working through that was a real challenge for some of the students this semester as well. And I’ve always had a few students, they tend to be what you would think of as high-achieving students who sit in this category. But it seems like it’s actually a bigger number of students or like stress and anxiety around this perfectionism seems to be elevated, causing students to become paralyzed, or the inability to move forward.

John: And I would think that the stacked nature of your class would make that a bit more of an issue in terms of the variance between people who have more background in the discipline and those who have less,

Rebecca: Yeah, I have my class structured so that students are doing things in groups with students that are at a similar level in experience. So yeah, I experienced that in the classroom as a whole, but within their smaller groups, not as much.

John: I think one of the issues that may have affected my class is at the start of the class, I was in the early stages of recovery from a broken leg. So I was kind of just leaning against a podium or sitting on a chair near their podium for the first couple of weeks. But one of the things that was different for me this semester is normally when students are working on problems, I’m wandering all through the classroom, and I kept hoping to be able to do that. But it wasn’t really until the end of the semester that I could even stand and move around a little bit through the whole class. But I did miss the ability to interact with students and help them work through their problems in small groups as I wandered through the classroom. I was very lucky to have a teaching assistant who was able to move around, but it would have been better if we both had that mobility. And I’m looking forward to being able to wander through my classes this spring.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that you say that, John, because this was the first semester I was back in person. The last two years, I’ve taught fully online, synchronously but online, and one of the things I missed about the kinds of classes I teach is that during class, we are often working on projects, and I in person can easily wander around and see where students are at and bring students together and do impromptu critiques or technical things a little more easily than I was experiencing online because, although they may be working, I couldn’t see, kind of casually just walking by, I couldn’t intervene when students weren’t where they needed to be, or were struggling and just didn’t want to ask for help, because I didn’t know, because they didn’t tell me. But when it’s in person and I’m wandering the room, I can make those observations and do those interventions. I did notice that in my walking around and doing interventions this year is a bit different than it had been prior to the pandemic in that some students would actively avoid me if I was coming near them… It was like, “Oh, no, I have to go the bathroom” or they would just disappear. And I would miss them in a class period because they were gone when I was heading their way. And those were students who were struggling and struggled throughout the semester. So it was students that didn’t want to admit that they needed help or didn’t want people around them to know they needed help. And what’s interesting, related to that, is that during synchronous online learning, I could help people one on one without other students knowing, because I could easily pull them into a separate breakout room and we could privately talk in a way that, in a studio environment, is not as possible. So it’s an interesting dynamic, finding my way again, because the things that used to work don’t quite work the way they used to, as you were also describing, and then other practices I got very used to in a different platform also just aren’t available in a face-to-face format. So I’m interested to see how I might be able to balance these things, because I’m teaching more of a hybrid format in the spring, and I might be able to get a little bit of the best of both worlds. I’m not sure.

John: Well, there is some research that suggests that a hybrid teaching format works better than either face to face or fully asynchronous. So it’ll be interesting to hear how that goes.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: I used to learn a lot about what students were struggling with just by overhearing their conversations as I walked along or by interacting with students directly. And I did miss that this semester and I’m looking forward to never ever having to deal with that again in the future.

Rebecca: Yeah, that was one of the things that I found most joy in being back in the physical classroom was just being able to wander around and greet students and have more low-key interactions with them, which also helps I think, with helping students move along and move through struggles.

John: One of the things you mentioned was the anxiety of students. And I know in my classes, students have become much more comfortable revealing mental health challenges. I’m not sure how much of it is that students are more comfortable revealing mental health challenges, or they are just experiencing many more mental health challenges than before. It’s good to know the challenges our students are facing. But when you hear dozens and dozens of such stories in a class, it can be a bit of a challenge in dealing with those.

Rebecca: Yeah, I found that I had a number of students who disclosed physical and mental health challenges they were facing this semester. And that did help me understand significant absences by those same individuals. And it also explained a lot of the struggle that they were experiencing in the coursework. Unfortunately, when students have so many things tugging at them, it’s really hard for them to focus on studies or to even prioritize that… they may need to prioritize some other things. And the student work or the students’ success in that population of students wasn’t as strong as some of the other students who were able to be present all the time and could do the outside work or were doing the outside work. I don’t know if it was “can” or “wanted to…” [LAUGHTER] …how that outside of class work was getting done. But those who are staying on top of the coursework as it was designed were more successful than students who had a lot of things that were causing them to be absent or to miss work.

John: And I know in our previous conversations, we’ve both mentioned that we’ve made more referrals to our mental health support staff on campus than we’ve ever had before. And it’s really good that we do have those services. Those services, I think, were a bit overwhelmed this semester and from what I’m hearing that’s happening pretty much everywhere. It’s often a struggle thinking about these issues. I know many times I’ve been awake late at night thinking about some of the challenges that my students are facing,

Rebecca: Students disclose things to us and then you do think about them, because we care about them as humans. Most of them are really nice humans. Some of them aren’t doing the coursework, but that doesn’t stop them from being nice humans that you care about. And it does take mental energy away when we’re thinking about these students and thinking about ways that we might be able to support them. And sometimes the ways to support them is completely outside of the scope of our jobs as instructors. And that’s disheartening sometimes, because there’s not an easy way for us to help other than a referral and you can see them struggling in class and you know why they’re struggling. But there’s not a lot of intervention, from a teaching standpoint, that can really happen sometimes with some of those students. And that’s just emotionally draining. Do you find that to, John? …that’s you’re thinking about them, but then you don’t really have a good solution for helping them often, academically anyway?

John: It’s a bit of a struggle, because you want students to be successful and you know, they’ve got some really serious challenges. One way of addressing this is to provide all students with the opportunity for more flexibility. And I know most of us have been doing this quite a bit during a pandemic. But one of the concerns that I’ve been having is that the additional flexibility often results in more delays in completing basic work that’s required to be successful later in the course, and the students who are struggling the most often are the students who put off doing the work to learn the basics that are needed to be successful. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I saw so many students withdrawing from the class this semester, much larger than I’ve ever seen it.

Rebecca: This is also, though, the first semester of a different policy related to withdrawals on our campus. And so some of that might be that students didn’t need to provide documentation to withdraw, like they would typically during the last few weeks of the semester. They were able to continue to withdraw until the very last day of class.

John: I’m sure that’s part of it, because many of the students who did withdraw had stopped working in the first week of the semester. And despite numerous reminders, both personal reminders and automated reminders using some of the tools built into our learning management system, they just were not responding. So I think some of them had made the decision fairly early to withdraw from the class.

Rebecca: Flexibility is an interesting thing to be thinking about. And I think both of us have advocated for levels of flexibility throughout the pandemic ,and prior to that as well. I don’t really have an extra penalty for students who miss class, their penalty is that they miss class and now it’s a struggle to keep up. And that often is the case. I provide flexibility in the kinds of assignments or what they might do for an assignment, some flexibility in deadlines, but the reality is, a lot of our classes are fairly scaffolded. And so if they don’t get the kind of beginning things, they’re not able to achieve the higher-level thinking or skills that we’re hoping that they can achieve by the end of the semester, because they haven’t completed those often skills-based tasks to help them practice things that they would need to perform higher-level activities.

John: I do have regular deadlines for some material in class. But what I do is I allow them multiple attempts at any graded activities where only the highest grade is kept. So they can try something, make mistakes and try it again, and, in many cases, do that repeatedly until they master the material. But there are some deadlines there along the way where they have to complete it. Because if they don’t, they won’t stand a chance of being able to move to the next stage of the course. To address issues where students do have problems that really prevent them from doing that, I end up dropping at least one grade in each of the grade categories. So that way, if students do face some challenges that prevent them from timely completing work by those deadlines, it won’t affect their grades. But I still encourage them to complete those assignments even if they’re not going to get a grade on it because they need to do that to be successful.

Rebecca: Yeah, deadlines can be really helpful for students who have trouble prioritizing or figuring out when to do things on their own. So deadlines are actually really important. Our scaffolding as instructors can be really important for students that need and want structure. And most students benefit from having structure in place and deadlines are part of that structure to help people move forward. But there can be flexibility within that. But if we provide too much flexibility, it becomes a challenge not only for students in terms of being able to level up in whatever they’re studying, but also in terms of faculty and workload and having to switch gears in terms of what you’re evaluating or giving feedback on. If we have to keep task switching, it’s a lot more straining than focusing on one set of assignments at a time.

John: One assignment where I did provide lots of flexibility was the podcast assignment, where I let students submit revisions at any time on that or submit late work because there were some challenges in finding times, and so forth. And I had a lot of work come in a month or more after it was originally due. And it did result in a lot of time spent during the final exam week and during the grading period after that, where I was spending a lot of time grading work that would have been nice to receive by the deadline, say 2, 3, 4 or 5 weeks earlier. But it did provide them with the flexibility that was needed, given the nature of the assignment, and one where they didn’t lose something in terms of their progress in the course, by submitting it late.

Rebecca: Yeah, projects are one of those things that I always encourage some continuous improvement on because often they’re so close. And if you just give them a little extra nudge or a little extra time, they can complete something at a higher level, especially when it’s something like a podcast or like my exhibit assignment that has a very public nature to it. We want students to feel like they’ve achieved something that they’re willing to share. And sometimes that means giving them a little extra time so that they can polish it. So it feels like it’s something that they can share and be really proud of. I guess that’s another argument for time and flexibility around non-disposable assignments. Right?

John: One of the other bright spots of the last several months was a return to more in-person conferences, where we got to see people that we haven’t connected with in person other than on Zoom or other tools for the last few years. And while we’ve attended many conferences over Zoom, one of the main benefits of in-person conferences are those little side conversations right after a session ends, or when you get to talk to the presenter after their session, or those conversations in the hallway over coffee. And it was really nice to return to those again, because that’s where a lot of the value of these conferences come from.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s interesting how much maybe I started longing for some of that again. I was finally starting to experience that on campus, again, as more people have been more physically present on campus, which has been nice. Those casual conversations often lead to interesting projects together or new ideas or initiatives, they improve my teaching, and they just improve relationships over time. And I think I was feeling a pretty strong loss around that. And it was nice to have that reinvigorated.

John: And it was especially nice to be at these conferences where there are a lot of other people who are really concerned about teaching and learning. And it helps rebuild that community that changed its nature during the pandemic, when people were very actively connecting but it was over social media, back when we had Twitter [LAUGHTER] as a functioning social network platform, and through online interactions, but it’s nice to have those in person connections again.

Rebecca: Yeah, I definitely agree. I had started to feel, not totally burnt out, but I was headed in that direction and reconnecting with people in person has gotten me excited about possibilities in higher education again. I lost interest. I wasn’t even following news for a bit. I had really pulled back a little bit because I just felt overwhelmed by everything around me and it was hard to stay on top of what was happening. And I think some of these in-person conferences reconnected me to some of what was going on and some of the people who are doing that work. But it definitely got me re-interested in a way that I was just starting to become a little uninterested.

John: It’s a reinvigorating experience.

Rebecca: So should we wrap up, John, by thinking about what’s next?

John: Yes, what’s next for you, Rebecca?

Rebecca: [LAUGHTER] Nice toss there, John. [LAUGHTER] Next semester is likely to look different for me. I’m only teaching one class in the spring as I focus some more attention to some interesting initiatives in Grad Studies on our campus. And that one class is going to be hybrid and relatively small. So it’s a really different kind of teaching experience than I’ve had before. So I’m looking forward to that new adventure, or both of those new adventures. How about you, John?

John: I’m teaching the same classes I’ve been teaching for several years, but I’m looking forward to them, it’s going to be nice to work with upper-level students again. My spring classes are primarily juniors and seniors, mostly seniors. And it’s a nice time to reconnect with those students that I had often last seen in class when they were freshmen. And it’s really rewarding to see the growth that students have achieved during their time on campus, and to see the increase in their maturity and their confidence. And I’m very much looking forward to whatever project they’re going to be doing in the capstone course. Because for the last four years, they’ve done book projects, I’m not sure what we’re going to be doing. And I enjoy that uncertainty at this stage, which I have to say the first time I did, it was a little bit more stressful. But now it’s something I look forward to, letting them choose what they want them to have as a main focus of their course. So I don’t know exactly what’s next, but I’m looking forward to it.

Rebecca: That’s wonderful. I’m thinking that my spring classes are all advanced students, which doesn’t typically happen, and so I’m really looking forward to the opportunity of taking a break from a stacked class and actually just teaching a smaller group of advanced students and allowing them to take me on an adventure, which I know it will be. And I look forward to more of that mentor kind of role in that course.

John: And I’m looking forward to more episodes of the podcast. We continue to have some really good guests coming up and these discussions are something I always look forward to.

Rebecca: And definitely something that has kept both of us, I think, afloat during this pretty challenging time over the last few years.

John: Definitely.

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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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