Category: collaborative learning

238. Engaged Teaching

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

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

Show Notes

Transcript

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

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

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

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

Rebecca: Love it!

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

Claire: I am not. I’m drinking water.

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

Claire: Nice. Good choice.

John: Supreme as in?

Rebecca: It’s supreme.

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

Rebecca: Yeah… [LAUGHTER]

John: That supreme empire.

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

John: It is just Twinings Irish breakfast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: Please teach us the ways. [LAUGHTER]

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

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

Claire: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claire: Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claire: Mmhmm.

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

Claire: Yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

Claire: That’s great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: That sounds awesome.

John: It does.

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

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

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

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

Claire: Great. Thanks very much.

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

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

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

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193. Making Team Projects Work

Posted in collaboration, collaborative learning, higher education, learning, pedagogy, teaching, team based learning
June 23, 2021

The ability to work effectively in teams is a skill that is highly valued by the employers of college graduates. Group projects in college classes, though, are not always designed to develop teamwork skills. In this episode, Lauren Vicker and Tim Franz join us to discuss strategies that we can use to create group activities that help students develop their teamwork skills while addressing complex problems. Lauren is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media and Communication at St. John Fisher College. Tim is a Professor and Interim Chair in the Psychology Department, also at St. John Fisher College. They are the authors of Making Team Projects Work: A Resource for High School and College Educators, which was released earlier this year.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: The ability to work effectively in teams is a skill that is highly valued by the employers of college graduates. Group projects in college classes, though, are not always designed to develop teamwork skills. In this episode, we explore strategies that we can use to create group activities that help students develop their teamwork skills while addressing complex problems.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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John: Our guests today are Lauren Vicker and Tim Franz. Lauren is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media and Communication at St. John Fisher College. Tim is a Professor and Interim Chair in the Psychology Department, also at St. John Fisher College. They are the authors of Making Team Projects Work: A Resource for High School and College Educators, which was just released earlier this year. Welcome Lauren and Tim.

Lauren: Thank you.

Tim: Thanks for having us.

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

Lauren: I am drinking tea. I am drinking Trader Joe’s Moroccan mint green tea, one of my favorites.

Rebecca: That sounds like something John would rock. [LAUGHTER]

John: I actually have a backup tea here which is Moroccan mint, but it’s a different brand.

Tim: …and Wegmans decaf green for me.

Rebecca: It’s a good one. Wegotta have the Wegmans on…

John: Wegmans has a wonderful collection of teas, especially in the larger stores. And I have ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: …and I am back to my good old English afternoon, John.

John: It’s been a year. I think you only had that once on the podcast in the last year or so.

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, I know. I was thinking like, I haven’t been drinking it very often. I need to get back to it.

John: Well, we have six boxes of it still in the office for when we return.

Rebecca: I have six boxes in this office too. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, you should be set for the week.

Rebecca: I’m good. I’m good.

Tim: I took all my tea home last August, because I knew it would be a while. I did finish all the office tea.

Rebecca: It’d be hard for us to do that.

John: We have hundreds of teas in the office, so yes. We’ve invited you here to discuss Making Team Projects Work. Could you tell us a little bit about how this project got started?

Tim: Yeah, this was an interesting project, because it’s really been something that Lauren and I have been talking about for years. When I first started here back in 2000, at St. John Fisher, we realized pretty quickly that we offer two similar courses, one in small group communication that Lauren was offering and one in small group dynamics that we were offering in psychology. And so what we did was merge the courses. And then we started team teaching it and have been team teaching for about 20 years together. Over the time of our team teaching, we realized that we were going way beyond with our team projects than most of our peers, most of our colleagues at St. John Fisher. And we realized that a lot of people don’t know all the details about running a team project. So, we wrote the book.

Rebecca: Sometimes students complain about group projects. There’s a lot of strengths and benefits, but also some reasons to maybe not do group projects. So can you talk a little bit about both some of the benefits and some of the weaknesses of doing group projects.

Lauren: So one of the best reasons came out last week in Inside Higher Ed a story about a survey that was done by a AAC&U (American Association of Colleges and Universities) where they surveyed 500 employers, CEOs, and hiring managers, and asked them about the top skills that they were looking for in their new hires. And number one, a top skill turned out to be ability to work in teams. So we really need to be preparing our students for the workplace. And that’s one of the best reasons to use a group project. It’s also a much better way to engage students while they are in the classroom. Get them involved, have them work with other people, give them some of those professional skills that they need, and also keeps them more engaged than say, listening to a passive lecture. So there are a lot of reasons why people don’t use group projects. And it is a lot of work to set up a group project, and to do it well. A lot of faculty think about group projects as a way that they can minimize their workload. So what they’ll do is they’ll take an individual project that they might give to students, and just turn it over to a group and say, “Here, do this.” Give it out. And then you don’t hear anything until the end of the semester or close to the time when the project is due. And that is definitely not the way to do it. And so what we’re proposing is that people follow a very systematic process. And we actually have a model that shows how you can walk through each of the steps and be able to turn what might be an individual project into a really good team project.

Tim: Rebecca, there are other reasons why faculty think you shouldn’t run group projects… for example, student complaints, sometimes you get some pretty serious student complaints about a project, or the problem with so many projects and so many team projects, especially, is social loafing, where one person just sits back and lets the other do it, or conflict, or all these other problems that teams can run into. But the reality is that the well designed team project can help to minimize a lot of those problems, especially if the faculty member uses a structured process, such as we suggest in our book, where there’s lots of steps involved, and the faculty members are checking in regularly with the team. Now, the other problem is that does take a little more work. But with good planning and practice, team projects can be really effective.

Rebecca: I’m certainly an advocate for collaborative work. I do a lot of team projects in my own classes and know there are a lot of planning things to do at the beginning. Can you outline some of the key things to think about before introducing a collaborative project to your students,

Lauren: We talk about an input-output model. So let’s start maybe with the inputs to the group. A lot of people think that they can, as we said before, just take an individual project and make it a team project. So attention to the task is really important. And we can talk about that more if you want to talk about what makes a good team task. But also, the people are a huge input. And one of the biggest mistakes that faculty make is allowing students to choose their own teams and just to say, “Okay, everybody break up in groups of four, or five, or six,” and go ahead and do it. And that is the worst way to do it. Because you are not going to get any heterogeneity, you’re not going to get people with diverse viewpoints and experiences, people are just going to be working with their friends. And the final input is actually the context. A lot of people overlook that, but it depends on what kinds of experiences do students have with working in teams. And there are some colleges and universities that have a lot of teamwork going on, and others that are still using a lot of lecture-based sage-on the-stage type of teaching. And so if the culture of the school isn’t used to doing teams, or if you don’t even have a physical setup for teams, where people are in kind of an amphitheater classroom, and it’s hard to move around into groups, all of those things can actually thwart it. And you have to also consider what else is going on at the time. So those of us who were using teams when the pandemic hit know exactly the challenges that that entails. So what we find is that you have to start at that very beginning in the planning… on planning your task and planning the people who are going to be there and then looking at the context that you’re going to be considering.

Tim: If I can follow up on one thing, Lauren, this idea of picking your own teams that so many people, and in our presentations, we’ve gotten some pushback on this, that “Oh, the students love picking their own teams.” But number one, and we’ve seen this in our class, and we both seen it separately. Sometimes friendships break apart in those teams, because the friends realize they have very different working styles and get very frustrated with one another. And then the other problem with letting people pick their own teams is the elementary school kickball on the playground problem where somebody is the last to get picked. And honestly, I had somebody in tears in my class a couple of years ago, when I did a very short project and decided I don’t have time to do all that. And the person didn’t get picked until very last. And that was awful. And this is not the way we want people in college to be picking their teams. When they get out in the workplace, they’re not picking their own teams there either.

John: I’ve had a similar experience when I’ve used group projects in my classes, and students will always say, “Can we make our own groups?” And what I’ve done the last several times I’ve done it, and it’s worked really effectively, is to ask them how they knew each other. These are upper-level classes, primarily, where I’m doing this. And they’ll say, “Well, we’ve taken a lot of classes together.” I said, “So we’d like to have teams where everyone has a good mix of experience on all the teams. But if you know these people because you’ve taken a lot of classes with them, that means you’ve probably taken more courses in the discipline than other people have. So if we put everyone together who has the most background in the material, we won’t get as much diversity in the group, but we’ll also end up with some teams having some really rich backgrounds in the discipline, and others having a somewhat weaker background. And that may not be the most equitable way of creating teams.” And once you say that to students, you get much more buy in and they’ll generally accept it. And then I’ll often ask them, “What might we use as a criteria to balance the teams?” …and they’ve come up with some good suggestions. And that’s worked pretty well.

Lauren: You’re absolutely right, John. We’re a really big fan of the team-based learning approach to forming teams, which is: make the criteria very transparent. So if you say “I don’t want you with people that you’ve had two or three classes with,” or “I don’t want you with people who are in the same major or at the same level,” that’s great. We’ve done a number of different things. Sometimes faculty can pick the criteria as you have done, John, other times I know Tim has used a questionnaire that he’s had students fill out like a self assessment of their skills, and then he’ll put the teams together that way and tell the students this is how you were put together. I actually had one class where I did let them pick the criteria, or suggest the criteria, and I said “That sounds like a good idea. Let’s give it a try.” And when we put the teams together, we realized that they were perfectly balanced. And it was one of the best TBL classes that I had. And when we went online during the pandemic, it was almost seamless, because the teams had already really been formed, and they had an identity, and they’d had successes together. And so it was a really great way to do it. So we’re a huge advocate of not letting students pick their own teams,.

Tim: …and letting it be that transparent process. That transparent process is so important.

John: I’ve used a Google form in the classroom, where, when it’s in the classroom, where it’s displayed on the screen, they submit their responses, I’ll sort them from highest to lowest according to that criteria, and just go down the list assigning the teams 1-2-3-4, etc., and it’s worked really well. And another nice thing about it is when the teams are formed with this sort of criteria, instead of by social network, the team has been created for a specific purpose and they tend, when they’re working together, to focus on their purpose, rather than talking about what they’re going to do that weekend and other things. I found that the students tend to be much more on task when the teams were created to be balanced, separate from any friendship relationships. They tend to separate it from the social networks that otherwise might tend to dominate some of the discussions when they’re in a physical classroom. The groups have been really productive that way.

Tim: That’s a fabulous point.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’ve had very similar experiences in my classes as well. I tend to have a lot of different majors that come together and so I often use that as one way of dividing up the differences of experience for these collaborative projects, and it tends to work out well, and they tend not to know each other, as a result. [LAUGHTER]

Tim: Well, and then on certain teams, Lauren, I don’t think you even know this, but two of the students in our last class, our last group dynamics class, are now the closest of friends. And they didn’t know each other before a class, so that division can actually open up the doors to new friendships as well.

Rebecca: One of the things that you talk about in your book, and this seems like a good moment to bring it up, is that teams need to form and get to know each other, understand the project, understand what each member’s expertise might be, what the tasks are at hand, and also a need for someone to kind of step into a facilitator role. We might call it a leader, we might call it a facilitator, whatever that might be, can you talk about how to make that process go smoothly? …because if that process doesn’t happen, as you indicate in your book, the team doesn’t work, because nothing ever gets done. [LAUGHTER]

Tim: Right. And the team can take so much longer to get to a level of performance. When we talk about team performance, the key theory of development is Tuckman, where most people have heard this… that forming, storming, norming, and performing… and we want to get our class projects right into that performing stage as quickly as possible, and a team charter can do that. And in that team charter, it’s allowing the team to create some guidelines. In those guidelines should be things like attendance and deadlines, how to deal with conflict, the levels of participation that they expect from one another, their communication standards and rotating responsibilities, as you said, Rebecca, who’s going to be taking notes at the meeting, who’s going to be facilitating the meeting, when is each person going to be taking the lead on each thing, meeting times and places and then even things like decision rules and ways to solve problems when they occur. Those are all things that we encourage our teams to develop upfront ahead of time so those discussions are productive, rather than during a time of conflict.

Lauren: And if some people think that a team charter is too formal, we’ve actually had the class as a whole agree on: What are the norms for the class? How are we going to run this class? …kind of giving them ownership. And we have all the teams get together and generate different rules for the class and then we post them up on our course management system. And so when there’s an issue, we say, “Hey, look, we said that people were going to answer any texts or email within 24 hours, or within 12 hours, or everybody was going to show up prepared to meetings.” So we can actually point to those. But I want to back up before we actually start the team charter, we are huge fans of icebreaker exercises. And I know one of the things that we had the luxury of doing in group dynamics was we were teaching about groups, so we could spend a lot of time talking about these issues. However, most faculty have content that they need to cover. I also teach a course in the Wegmans School of Pharmacy and I know how much content people in the sciences and the humanities… they have so much to cover. They don’t really have a lot of time to talk about the group dynamics. And so they might assume that just because you’re working on a team project, you’re learning to work in a team, but we really want the teams to be able to do some icebreaker exercises in the beginning, even if it’s just fun stuff, you know, like what do you binge watching? What kind of pets do you have? Where are you from? …just getting to know each other. We think that that is hugely important. Just to get to know each other on a personal level, and then they get a little bit more ownership of the team. So while John’s right that not knowing people may be good and make you a little more task oriented, you still have to be concerned about all the people. And we know that, like this past year, a lot of students have really suffered from some anxiety and mental health issues. So we want them to feel comfortable talking to the group when they need to, we think that that is an important piece. So starting with that, and then they can constructively work together on that team charter.

Rebecca: To take one of those icebreaker activities that I’ve done in my classes that’s been really fun is to design an emoji. Of course, I teach a design class, so it’s related, but the students have had a lot of fun doing that activity, but it immediately gets them figuring out a way to work together and just talk a little more socially. So it’s kind of a task to do, it doesn’t really matter what the outcome is.

Tim: Some of the best icebreakers are actually relevant to the course or relevant to the team project. If you can make them relevant, they’re even better. And so I think that’s a perfect one.

Lauren: Yeah, emojis or I have them design a logo for their team… come up with a team name, and then a logo, and in the olden days, I would print up the logo and put it on their team folder. Now we have to do that virtually. [LAUGHTER]

John: One of the issues that, as you mentioned before, often shows up for students in terms of past experience with groups, are those people who may be sharking. In your book several times you mentioned the student named Fred. Could you tell us a little bit about Fred and how to deal with students like Fred.

Tim: Fred is actually a real student. This was not a hypothetical story. I think we embellish a little, but you saw us both laugh when you mentioned, Fred.

Rebecca: I think I’ve met Fred. [LAUGHTER]

John: I think we’ve all met Fred. [LAUGHTER]

Lauren: So again, we go back to what’s happening with this project? What is Fred doing or not doing? What has the team decided on their norms, or their roles for the team? And what are the sanctions for someone who is social loafing and not pulling their weight in the team? And one of the things that we talk about extensively, and this is also a big part of team-based learning, is peer evaluations. People who are not doing what they’re supposed to be doing on the team should be getting feedback from each other, and not just at the end of the project. Very often, we wait to the end, and we say, “team evaluations.” And all of a sudden it says, “Wait, Rebecca didn’t show up for any of the meetings. John wasn’t prepared for the presentation.” We need to know that along the way, and we recommend check-ins frequently with the groups. So we spend time informally checking in with the teams, meaning just wandering around the class or, if they’re in breakout rooms, popping into the breakout rooms to see what they’re doing, or actually having formal check-in times. We’ve sometimes given surveys to the class to find out how things are going, sometimes we make them anonymous. So we find out where are you on the project? How is everybody doing? And other times we ask them to specifically evaluate the contributions of each member. Another thing that we’ve done in the past is actually set up Google folders for all of the teams with instructor access. And that way we tell them, “Okay, everything that you do is going to go into that Google folder.” So the instructor has a way of looking in and saying, “Fred, it’s been three weeks, and you have put nothing into the Google folder, what’s going on?” So we can talk to the teams individually, but also talk to Fred individually, as well.

Tim: Yeah, and just as instructors, it’s our job to give students those skills for teamwork, because that’s what their employers and grad schools want. It’s also our job as instructors to develop our students. And that process of multiple check-ins, though, that’s one of the areas where it does take more work, we need those multiple check-ins to see how things are going. And Lauren, I think you emphasized and I can’t stress enough, the importance of these formal and informal peer and instructor evaluations that are going on throughout the process of this team project to keep them on track and develop their skills so that they can improve and be better team members when they leave our campus.

Rebecca: You have a couple other scenarios of student or learning situations around leadership that I think are maybe important to address as well, the idea that the team seems it’s going great, but come to find out it’s the one person doing all the work and no one else is allowed to do anything. And then there’s also the opposite where just nobody’s doing anything because nobody knows who’s in charge. Can you talk a little bit about how to make sure that there’s maybe a leader who’s not a dictator? …someone who’s really acting more as a facilitator within a team.

Tim: Well, I think this is another area where it does take a little extra time. And if we want to develop these teamwork skills in our students, we need to teach to the teamwork skills and teach to the leadership skills, at least a little time …and I’m not talking taking whole weeks of class but 15 to 20 minutes to put our expectations down and have them help get those expectations out there so that they know what it means to rotate through leadership. They know what the five or 10 top leadership characteristics are that their team expects of them when they’re leading. And we do emphasize the importance of rotating in the leadership role. That is important because we want everybody to lead team meetings and everybody to take notes at team meetings, not leave all that to one person.

Lauren: And students are really reluctant to take on the leadership role. They don’t want to seem like it’s a power grab sort of thing. And so it’s important for them to understand the nature of leadership, that it isn’t one autocratic person telling everybody what to do, that they understand the different perspectives on leadership. And again, we have the luxury of being able to talk about that, about different types of leadership, and we have our students do leadership assessments. And it’s helpful for them to be able to talk about when they go to a job interview. They’ve got something where they can discuss how they see themselves as leading the team.

Tim: Right, those demonstrable activities that they can actually show on paper in a portfolio, I say on paper, but it certainly could be electronic in these days.

Rebecca: I think one thing that comes up frequently when we talk about groups and group dynamics is setting on and establishing roles. And I’m hearing you both emphasize the idea of rotating some of those roles. And I think this is a place where faculty struggle to set up good structure. Can you talk a little bit about some of the rotating roles that should be there and how do we encourage students to rotate over the course of a semester?

Tim: Some of those roles I think we’ve already mentioned, certainly leadership should rotate at meetings. A lot of those roles occur in meetings. So, at a meeting, you want somebody who’s leading or facilitating, we often prefer the term facilitating, because that is somebody who’s just leading that meeting, then you need a note taker, then you need on top of that a timekeeper, somebody who’s keeping that team on task. But even beyond just the simple meeting strategies, where everybody should be getting some practice and learning opportunities throughout all those, when you’re thinking about roles, there’s also those informal roles, like somebody who could be the cheerleader for the team and trying to get people to feel better. And somebody who could be the one who’s asking the questions or giving the task-based answers, keeping them on track during their problem solving or decision making. These are all roles that each person should be practicing. We all tend to fall into our own roles that we are used to. And by forcing them out of their comfort zone and into some of these other roles, they can get better at being a team member, and bring more inputs, as Lauren introduced at the beginning, into the team project.

Lauren: But having said that, it is a lot more challenging to do when you’ve got an online class or online team projects, because, especially if it’s an asynchronous class, so it really depends on your circumstances. And another thing we found is that as the project progresses and students are getting closer to the deadlines, they definitely have to start solidifying their roles, they need one person who’s going to collect all the data and one person who’s going to do the data analysis and one person who’s going to organize, whether it’s a portfolio or slides or whatever that they’re going to do. So that part becomes important as well. And so one of the things we’re teaching them is to be flexible in their roles and realize that maybe you were a leader on the last project, but you’re not the expert to be the leader of this particular project. Or maybe you’re a really good graphic designer. And so you should do our slides for our presentation or design the portfolio. So trying to make sure that everybody gets a chance to show their strengths, as well.

John: I know when Rebecca and I have presented together jointly, she was always very quick to volunteer to do it, [LAUGHTER] because she wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing it. [LAUGHTER]

Tim: Well, Lauren and I have the same exact relationship, because I’m going to give Lauren some credit here, [LAUGHTER] she is way better at doing slides. And now when I’m doing the slides, I do my outline and hand it over to Lauren electronically to clean it up and make it look nice. [LAUGHTER] And it looks a lot better when we get it to the point where we’re going to use it.

John: So that does suggest though, that using the expertise of some of the group members can be helpful. But you do also want to provide some rotation in tasks. And that could be a bit of a challenge. Would you recommend instructors giving students are a rotating list of at least some of those positions? Or would you encourage the teams to do that on their own, such as the leadership role and other roles?

Tim: Well, I think the areas where you have expertise, you should certainly…. that’s the advantage of teams… you can spread the work out but you can also at least get closer to that idea of team synergy because you’re pulling together all those diverse views, all those diverse backgrounds, all that diversity in expertise. And oftentimes when we use the term diversity, we use it to mean race, but diversity is much, much broader than that. And so you can pull together that diversity in expertise and come up with a much better outcome, a much better product that the students are proud to share, and show off in the future. So yes, you certainly want to leverage the expertise of your students. But there are certain areas where you want the students to get some practice with those roles, as you pointed out, John.

Lauren: And I think if we don’t set them up, they probably won’t happen naturally. And so we need to be talking to them about it, giving them some experience doing it. A lot of it is putting the responsibility on the team and the students to say, “Okay, here’s something that we want to see you doing,” and have them explain to us how that happened. So one of the things that we’ve done when we have students give team projects is not just talk about what they found out when they did the project, but what was their process like? …and describing that, because you can learn a lot from hearing how other teams managed it. And you can actually see, during presentation time or reading portfolios, how they approached it, and which processes were most successful.

Rebecca: One of the things that we do in our design classes is something called a process video for just that. So if they’re working collaboratively, they describe and show their process for the project in a short video, like a three- to five-minute video. And it’s really interesting sometimes to see the way that different team members describe the same process.

Lauren: I love it. I love it.

Tim: That’s fabulous. The importance of reflection on their group work, it can’t be understated, because a lot of times is, Professors, we focus on the task outcome, but what we want for our students is also all the other stuff that comes along with teamwork, where they learned what it means to be a team member. And it’s those reflective activities at the end: “How did you get to this? Where did you help? Where could the team do better?” Those are the things that can really help our students develop those teamwork skills in the future.

Rebecca: Sometimes those things are so invisible too, unless we directly ask them to explain or narrate. I’ve been surprised often, in watching the process videos like”Oh, is that how you did that? I didn’t realize.” [LAUGHTER] It’s really interesting sometimes to see how they did something technically or how they arrived at a particular idea which hadn’t been explained to me in a one-on-one meeting or something or with a group meeting.

Lauren: And one of the things that we have done at the end of a big project is we have asked the teams to self assess, and actually tell us verbally, in front of the whole class, what they think they did well, what they’d like to do if they were going to do that project again, or going forward, how they will use that. And then we have other teams give peer feedback too, so it’s a good discussion. And it’s after they have finished the project, so there’s a sense of relief. But also, it’s important to say “Just because you turn the project in, that’s not the end of the process, you’ve got to look back and take those lessons with you to the next group experience.” And we should point out that there are some programs, especially in graduate programs, where people are in the same teams for a year or even two years. And so if you’re going to be doing more projects with the same team, it’s just invaluable to be able to learn from each of those experiences and take it forward.

John: One of the issues along those lines that came up with a podcast we did earlier with Olga Stoddard was an examination of long-term group projects and leadership roles in terms of gender. This was in an MBA program, which was disproportionately male dominated. And one of the things that happened in groups where women were in the minority, their leadership tended to be undervalued, or their rating of their leadership skills tended to be rated relatively low, while in groups where they were the majority or represented the whole group, their leadership evaluation was quite a bit higher. So one of the things, in terms of roles, that could be an issue is gender bias, and so forth in constructing the group. There’s also lots of research that shows that women are more likely to be asked to take minutes in meetings or to be the recorder in groups. Might it be worthwhile to address some of these issues with the groups before the groups create their charter or before they start their processing?

Lauren: Absolutely. And we do talk about implicit bias, not just gender, but on other factors as well, that it is important for students to have that call to their attention. Fisher has more females than males. So we haven’t had that much of an issue in classes. But I have seen that happen. I taught at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester for a while and you see that sort of thing happening, but students may not even realize what they’re doing. And so calling it to their attention is really important. I recently hosted a DEI panel at the TBLC conference. And one of the things that came out was, if you only have a few people of color in the class, don’t spread them out. So each group has one person of color who has to represent their entire race. And it’s that sort of thing students don’t really understand. And I think sometimes faculty don’t even understand what the implications are. But how valuable that lesson can be for the students going forward.

Rebecca: We spent a lot of time talking about interpersonal relationships in groups in our discussion today, but maybe we can also talk a little bit about the kinds of activities that might be appropriate to do as a group, as opposed to what might be more appropriate for individuals.

Tim: Well, there are definitely tasks that are not appropriate for teamwork. For example, writing a paper, if you want people to write a paper together, that’s a task that really isn’t a typical team task. A team task, one that’s designed for a team, should be complex, it should be challenging, it should require lots of ways to solve it, and it should force some level of cooperation. And I wish we could give some examples. But the problem is that the task is very discipline dependent. And what task works for one discipline is different for another. But if you’re trying out a team task, then you can use it, you can see what works and see what you need to change or have some of your colleagues and peers review it and see what they think is relevant and what they think works and what they think might not work about it. Because we’re all trying to improve. We’re all lifelong learners. And so we can improve ourselves, too.

Lauren: And that’s another reason why you don’t want to take an individual project and turn it over to a group. Because those cooperation requirements are so important. They’re valuable for the students learning the content for the course, but also learning how teams work and how they can develop in those.

Tim: And back to those multiple check-ins. Once you start to force people to cooperate in a complex and challenging task, then it’s really difficult for certain students to let go their control and let others do it. But if you’re doing the multiple check-ins, you’re getting the information about which members are doing their work, and which members are not in time so that they can change and improve and develop.

Rebecca: Although cooperative tasks are different in different disciplines. Can you give an example from the classes that you’ve taught together, of where cooperation becomes an important key or important element to a project that you’ve assigned?

Tim: Oh, yeah, we’ve got quite a few of them, because we use team projects, not just together in our group dynamics class, but in many other classes. And so I ‘m going to pick my industrial and organizational psychology class. And in that class, they do a client project where they go out and they do a survey within an organization. And when they do that survey in an organization, I have them divided up to one person who’s the main client contact, and one person who does the data analysis, and one person who’s the lead for the first half of the project. And the project takes a lot of steps, I give them a stepwise document for what they should do, but there’s a lot of steps involved. And it’s something they’ve never done, writing a client type report instead of…. I’m in psychology… that dreaded APA-style paper that is [LAUGHTER] so frustrating for so many students. And in this case, they haven’t done this, so they’re trying to figure this out, dividing it up, and then coming back together and building on each other’s work to do this client survey.

Lauren: Now another project that we did in our group dynamics class was we had students actually do an observational report on a real-life group on campus. And so they had to choose a group, they had to get permission to observe the group, they had to observe the group at least three times, they had to give a certain number of instruments, whether they were things that measured interpersonal skills, leadership skills, roles, conflict resolution, that sort of thing. And then they had to go and observe the group and do a post-meeting analysis and ask people to say, “How did you think the meeting went?” So it required a lot of coordination, because they had to find a group that would give them permission to observe. And then they had to come back and figure out how were you going to collect this data, who was going to be responsible for doing that. When a meeting’s over, most of the time the students all get up and they want to leave the meeting, get to class or whatever. So they had to figure out how they were going to get that information from people. And when it was all done, they had to put it together and display their data. They had to show the results of all of the surveys they had done, the observations, they had to look at the task, the people, the contexts, and analyze those things. And then they were asked to analyze all those things that happened when the group got together. How was their communication style? What kind of norms did you notice? And it became really interesting to watch the students recognize things that they had done, and maybe not even realized, that they were either supportive of the group goals or not so supportive of the group goals, depending on what was happening. And then they had to come and give recommendations. And the groups that they observed were told that, if they wanted the recommendations, they would give them the executive summary from their report. So that was a task that required everybody being involved because they couldn’t all do all of the things. And it was pretty complex, and a long semester project.

Rebecca: So it sounds like scope is an important piece of the puzzle with collaborative assignments.

Tim:: Absolutely.

John: Do you have any other advice for our listeners?

Lauren: One of the things that we haven’t talked about was making sure that everybody is involved in the group. And it’s easy for people in groups to get lost if they don’t know the people well, if they may be shy and not comfortable speaking up… maybe it’s their first class in a particular subject matter. And so we’ve talked about this idea of checking in and making sure that everybody’s involved and that’s one thing that you can do is to encourage that sort of feedback, and making sure that everybody understands that everyone has to be involved, that that’s part of the requirements for the group tasks. Starting off with those icebreakers is just great, because it gets you to know everyone, and so people start to feel more comfortable. And especially again, I’ll say with online classes, it’s an issue because people don’t put their cameras on, they mute their microphones, they don’t show up for team meetings because of a scheduling conflict, and that sort of thing. So it makes it difficult, but you’ve got to make sure that with formal and informal check ins that everybody is involved and know what their role is and what their deliverable is going to be for the project.

Tim: And if I can follow up on a different thing, but it’s related to what Lauren finished on, in the online environment. We are all teaching in this different environment now, getting used to teaching online. And that’s difficult. And it’s difficult for us, it’s difficult for our students. What we found is our students often don’t know all the tools available to them, nor do they know how to use all those tools that are available to them. And so helping, especially on a team project, helping them realize all the different ways they can communicate, because if left to their own devices, it’ll be primarily by text, [LAUGHTER] and if other students are like ours. And so helping them to see that they have all these other things available that are both things they can do at the same time (synchronous tools), and asynchronous tools (things that they can use that drop information where other team members can get to it later).

Rebecca: I think that’s a really important point, Tim, not just in the online environment, just generally when students are collaborating, because they may not always be able to be in person together at the same time in any context. So having strategies to deal with communication or deal with sharing materials can be really helpful. And sometimes that means, in my experience at least, doing some little activities to introduce them to those tools so they can kind of level up in the technical skill sets that might be necessary before expecting them to be using it in their teams.

Tim: Absolutely. What’s interesting is, I’m going to date myself here, and sorry, Lauren, you’re coming along on the ride with me on this one, [LAUGHTER] but when Lauren and I first started teaching group dynamics together, we used to talk about teams that were either virtual or not virtual, because that’s the way it was at the time, your team was one or the other. And now in today’s environment, no team is all face to face, and no team is all virtual. I have a colleague next to me that I’ve texted, emailed and called and her office is right next to mine. And so we have a lot of computer-mediated communication, even in face-to-face teams now. So it’s the level of virtuality, everybody is using these tools. How can we use them to match the task and to match the skill set that the people on the team have?

Lauren: So at the beginning of this conversation, we talked about our book being based on a model that was an input-output model. And so we talked a little bit about the inputs, the things that happen in the middle are the communication and the conflict and the norms and roles, but to really be aware of what the outputs are. And faculty need to be aware of those before they assign the project. As much as we hate having to put together rubrics, it’s something that students need to have, they need to know how are they going to be evaluated. So we tend to focus, though, a lot on the task rubric. And that’s important. Obviously, we want students to get the content that relates to the course material, but we also need to have a rubric for those self and peer evaluations. And so the output is not only the task output, how did they do on the task? …but what did they take as a result from working on that task together? What kind of feedback did they get? How are they seeing themselves? …and actually having structured rubrics not just saying, “Well, what do you think? How did you do?” actually giving them a form to fill out and we’ve got some examples in the book and on our website too, that show what people can do. We’ve even got some from high school that were not as detailed as the ones that we gave our college students, but it’s important that they see the output of it is not just what the grade was on the project. But there’s more detail for that.

Rebecca: Students have a tendency to think that the output is the thing that the most weight or value was placed on. And I know, in my classes, it’s really the process. [LAUGHTER] So when I show them those rubrics and show them the weighting between the task versus the actual process of making the thing that you’re outputting, they’re often surprised. And I have to remind them constantly throughout the process, or through the project, that this process piece is important, you need to stop shortcutting this, this is the thing that actually matters the most, this is where the learning is happening.

Lauren: This is so true, I teach public speaking, and students think that the person with the best delivery is going to get the best grade. And I said, but look at the rubric, delivery is only 15% of the grade, you’ve got to do research, you’ve got to do organizing, you’ve got to have your citations in there, and you’ve got to have visuals, and how you handle Q&A, and all of those sorts of things. So it is a good example, Rebecca, of how there’s a lot more to it. And we need to lay it out so students know what it is.

John: And sharing those rubrics in advance with students in the learning management system or in person if it’s face to face, but preferably in the learning management system, so they have access to them anytime, and referring back to them regularly, will help remind them and help you be more transparent and how you’re assessing student work.

Tim: We remind our students: we want to start with the end in sight, what is it that you need at the end and build the project based on that end goal. So if we can provide those rubrics and those processes through which we’re going to be evaluating them, we get better work from our students. And that’s what we all want is better work for our students.

Lauren: And from time to time, we actually pull the rubric up during class and say, “Does this look familiar? Did anybody notice that this is the way you’re going to be evaluated?” …because they get involved in their project and then they lose sight of some of those details that are going to be important. For example, we had a project where students had to use two synchronous tools and two asynchronous tools when they were working on their project. And we went around and started asking them well, like, “What’s one of your synchronous tools?” They were saying: “Well, we’re using Google Docs.” We’re like, “Well, wait a minute, just because you’re both on the Google Doc at the same time, doesn’t make it a synchronous tool,” [LAUGHTER] and so it gave us a chance to really give them some clarification about what they needed to do. And so that’s why the rubric at the beginning is so important.

Rebecca: I think this is a good moment to wrap up in some ways, because it’s like we’ve got our end in sight, we’ve got a process in place. And so we always wrap up by asking: what’s next?” (that nice reflection kind of question) [LAUGHTER]

Lauren: Great.

Tim: That’s a great question, because we do have the “what’s next.” Number one is we post blog posts on our LinkedIn sites every Tuesday. So we’re constantly developing content. For example, on May 18, we talked about giving feedback and peer evaluations, we have something about how to teach peer evaluation, so your students do a better job at it. That’s on our blog posts. And we also have a student version of our handbook coming out in September. It’s going to be matched to the professor version, the handbook for the instructor, except it’s going to be more student friendly, a lot less writing a lot less “how to” in the text and a lot more based on checklists and exercises and guidelines, rather than simply explaining the things.

John: That sounds like a great project.

Tim: Thank you.

Lauren: Thank you. And we’re looking forward to being able to get more feedback from educators. We have a lot of professionals who follow us on LinkedIn as well, and so respond to some of those topics. And we’ve done a number of professional development seminars for different colleges and universities that have been pretty well received. So we’re looking forward to it. But we’ve got a lot of resources on our website, which we can put in the show notes and people can find a lot of information there and just get an idea of some tools they can use as well as contact us if they want more information.

Rebecca: Excellent. Thanks so much.

John: Thank you.

Lauren: Thank you so much for having us. It’s been a lot of fun.

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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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182. Gender and Groups

Posted in collaborative learning, diversity, equity, gender, gender bias, higher education, inclusion, learning, stereotype threat, teaching
April 7, 2021

When we sort students into cooperative learning groups, we often attempt to create balanced groups that reflect the diversity of the students in our classes. In this episode Olga Stoddard joins us to discuss her recent research that suggests that this approach can be harmful for female students in classes in which a majority of the students are male.

Olga is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Brigham Young University, a Research Fellow at IZA (the Institute of Labor Economics), and the Research Director at the Science of Diversity and Inclusion Initiative, and the Co-Director of the Gender and Civic Engagement lab at BYU.

Show Notes

  • Stoddard, Olga B.; Karpowitz, Christopher F.; Preece, Jessica (2020) Strength in Numbers: Field Experiment in Gender, Influence, and Group Dynamics, IZA Discussion Papers, No. 13741, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
  • Zölitz, Ulf and Jan Feld (2018), “The effect of peer gender on major choice.” University of Zurich, Department of Economics, Working Paper.
  • Sandberg, S. (2013). Lean in: Women, work, and the will to lead. Random House.

Transcript

John: When we sort students into cooperative learning groups, we often attempt to create balanced groups that reflect the diversity of the students in our classes. In this episode we discuss recent research that suggests that this approach can be harmful for female students in classes in which a majority of the students are male.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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John: Our guest today is Olga Stoddard. Olga is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Brigham Young University, a Research Fellow at IZA (the Institute of Labor Economics), and the Research Director at the Science of Diversity and Inclusion Initiative, and the Co-Director of the Gender and Civic Engagement lab at BYU. Welcome, Olga.

Olga: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

John: …really pleased to have you.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Olga: I was going to be prepared and I have my mug, but unfortunately, it’s only filled with water because I ran out of time to heat it. [LAUGHTER] So, water for me today.

John: Tea is mostly water. We’re recording this in mid February when there’s a bit of a nationwide snow covering. And I’m drinking spring cherry green tea to set a better mood for the future.

Rebecca: I think that seems like a good plan. And for a change, I’m drinking Chai.

John: Wow. Okay, I don’t think I’ve seen you drink that on here before.

Rebecca: It’s not a common one for me. But it’s nice to mix it up occasionally. Of course my Chai doesn’t have dairy in it. So it’s just the tea part of the Chai

Olga: Is it flavored Rebecca?

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s nicely spiced.

Olga: Nice.

John: We do normally in our office have a variety of flavored Chai teas, but they’re safely locked up in our building. We haven’t visited in a long while. We’ve invited you here today to discuss your research with Chris Karpowitz and Jessica Preece concerning how the gender composition of teams affects women’s participation and role in team activities. Could you tell us a little bit about the study?

Olga: Yeah, absolutely. So this study was a collaboration with a top 10 accounting program in the US. We partnered with them to randomly assign different gender compositions of teams in this program. So, like many programs in the US, especially business programs, like MBA programs, this particular program relies on a pedagogical group-based approach in which students are assigned into teams, in this case, teams of five. And they work together quite intensively throughout the semester. So throughout the four months that’s their first semester in the program, they work on assignments together, they meet socially outside of the classroom, they even do some of the exams as a group. And so there’s a lot of interaction between those students within those seats. for that period of four months. Normally, because this program has a really small percentage of women, so about 25% of the students in the program are women, the way that these groups had been formed in the past is to assign one woman per group, so as to sort of dilute the women, to have men have experience in an academic and professional setting interacting with women. There is some prior research in the laboratory that has shown that this really is detrimental for women’s ability to be influential, for their willingness to participate, to be engaged. And so what we wanted to do is we wanted to test whether that laboratory evidence plays out in a similar way in the, so to speak, real world setting, more naturally occurring kind of environment. So we partnered with the program and randomly assigned some women to be in the condition where they were the only woman in the group. So the status quo, this is how things have been done. One woman and four men in a five person group, and then other women were randomly assigned to be in a condition where they were in the majority. So there were three women and two men in a five person group. We then tracked these students for the following two years. We had them complete monthly surveys and peer evaluations of their group members. We had them come into the laboratory twice a semester, where we had them work on a team-building exercise, and we watched who’s participating. These exercises were recorded, so we could see who’s speaking, who is interrupting, with speaking for how long. so that we could precisely measure women’s participation, but also measure their level of influence. Because on these tasks, the way that we designed them, women could exert more or less influence depending on certain decisions they make. So we had different ways to measure their level of influence, their participation, and whether others perceive them to be influential, and sort of more like leaders in the group. And so we did that for the following two years. We had two cohorts of students participate in the study. And what we found is that women who were randomly assigned to be the lone woman in the group were perceived to be significantly less influential, and were actually exerting a lot less influence in the group than the equally qualified women who had been assigned to be in the majority in their group. And so we saw really striking differences across those two conditions. Again, these are equally qualified, very well prepared academically women. This program is very competitive. They have prior leadership experience. And yet we find these huge differences across the two conditions in our case, depending on whether women were in the minority or the majority, they were seen significantly less influential by their peers.

Rebecca: Was the perception of the women in the groups different from the start of the study or the beginning of the group formation versus the end of the group formation? Or was it kind of consistent?

Olga: Yeah, that’s a good question. So one advantage of our study is that we can track these students over a relatively long period of time. Most laboratory studies up to date have relied on sort of these one-shot types of interactions, where strangers meet for a period of an hour or so and never interact again. One thing we wanted to know is do these patterns that had been observed in the lab to date, exacerbate over time, or do things get better as team members get to know each other, they get to experience women’s authority or their expertise. And what we found is that it’s mixed evidence on this. So in these surveys, these are monthly surveys that students have to fill out about each other… we call them peer evaluations… and in these peer evaluations, we ask them “Who is the most influential member of your group?” And they state who is the most but also who’s the least influential. What we found that over time, over the course of those four months that these students work together as a group, there is an improvement for the lone women, that their peers perceive them to be more influential over time. For the women in the majority, there seems to be no change. And so we do see the gap closing by the end of the semester, relative to the large gap in the beginning of the semester, but only in the survey data. Once we actually look at the data from the lab, where we observe students interacting in teams, where we can measure who is exerting influence on a task, we see no difference over time. So it seems that there is some improvement for the lone women in these sort of general assessments of influence in these monthly “Who was the most influential member of your group over the course of the month?” But when you actually get down to the specific tasks, we don’t see any improvement for women over time.

John: I know you were looking at this in a very broad context, in terms of teams and organizations and firms and so forth. But in terms of classroom groups of the sort that you were actually experimenting with, a growing number of classes in pretty much all disciplines now rely on group activities. What does the study suggest about how we form these groups in terms of the gender composition of groups, so that everyone can have an active role in the group?

Olga: Like you said, both in the workplace and in many academic settings, group work is crucial. And many faculty members rely on group- based activities. Understandably, they prefer collaborative thinking and develop the skills that students will need as they go on in workplaces where increasingly there’s reliance on group work. And so certainly the implications from our study are that assigning groups in which women are the lone woman or in the minority is going to have costs for women, costs in terms of participation, in terms of influence, in terms of whether they’re seen as authoritative, as leaders in the group. Those are the types of questions we ask and things that we can measure. And so certainly, if at all possible, groups that are gender balanced, or groups in which women are in the majority, are going to be significantly better for women in terms of these types of outcomes. Now, I would add a couple of caveats here. One is that in our study, we can track the grades. We can see what students actually get at the end of the semester. And we find no penalty for women, as far as grades can tell, when they’re in the minority. The women who are in the minority receive about the same grades as women who are in the majority. However, the grades in this program are largely group based. So it may not be surprising, because so much of the grade is based on the group work that we’re not finding those differences. Moreover, we don’t know how women get to those grades. It’s possible that because of these influence gaps, they’re having to work extra hard to get the same grade, or to be seen as sufficiently expert in that particular class. And so those are the two caveats that, even though we don’t observe differences in grades in our study, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t underlying differences in how hard students are having to work or how much effort they’re having to exert. I would also note that, regardless of the gender composition, there were no differences in man’s perception. So the man, whether they were in the minority, or in the majority, saw no deficit in influence, they were equally likely to be seen as a leader, they were seen equally influential. And so, if one thinks well, putting men In the minority is going to all of a sudden hurt the men in the group. That’s not what we’re finding. And there is in fact quite a bit of literature now confirming that. There are laboratory studies and studies in different settings, like nursing school, where men are in the minority, and in fact are not incurring any kind of deficit as far as influence or participation or authority that the women are incurring in these kinds of settings in which they’re a minority. I would also mention one study, it’s a working paper by a PhD student at University of Zurich, and it’s a really great working paper. She’s looking at a setting in which women are a minority… economics… a setting we’re familiar with. And in that setting, she’s using some data from, I believe it’s University of Zurich, it might be another university in Europe, but at that university, they also created different study groups, just like in our study, except these are larger study groups. These are sections of about 50 to 60 students, and they also randomly assigned gender compositions of these study groups. And what she shows is that, over time, the women that are assigned to be in a group in which they’re a minority, are much more likely to drop out of the study group altogether; that they not only incur these potential influence deficits, which we document in our study, but there are, in fact, very serious consequences to their ability to thrive in that class, or to thrive in that environment in which there are a minority. So that’s closely related, of course, to our study, and confirms really similar patterns.

John: We’ll share a link to both studies in the show notes. You mentioned that in disciplines like economics, and more generally, in STEM fields, women are often underrepresented as students, but they’re also underrepresented in faculty. It’s likely that these types of issues will carry over into group meetings and team meetings and department meetings and so forth on campuses. What can women and departments do to address this problem?

Olga: Yeah, that’s a very good question. Certainly, the setting in which we study these topics is student groups. But we are more than confident that these kinds of patterns replicate in a variety of settings, including professional settings, whether you’re a faculty or a student, being in the minority as a woman entails these costs to your level of influence, to your ability to exert influence, to your ability to be heard and taken seriously. And certainly there are other studies that have found very similar patterns in other kinds of settings. So I would not be surprised that if we ran this study in a professional setting or a workplace, we would find very similar patterns among women at all levels, including leadership. Certainly, some studies have confirmed similar patterns among the board of directors, female directors. The question of what can women do to sort of fix this is a really complicated one. And I say that because, what we find in our particular study, for example, is that women can’t just overcome that deficit by working extra hard. One thing that we observe is their levels of participation, how much time they put into coursework, and things like that. And we find that to be the same, regardless of the condition in which they’re in. They’re working extra hard already. Another thing that we observe is their talk time. In this laboratory setting, we can measure how long each person talks. And so you might say, well, maybe women, they’re just not leaning in, maybe they’re not participating enough in these group discussions, and so of course, they’re not seem as influential. Well, we find that’s not the case. These women are in fact leaning in. They’re speaking just as much regardless of the condition in which they’re in. The women and the minorities are going out of their way to try to get their opinions heard. They’re speaking just as much, as far as we can tell, based on the speaking turns and speaking time that we can observe. And so the failure to lean in can’t explain this gap in influence. So the common sort of Sheryl Sandberg “lean in” approach is that women just need to participate more and become equal participants in the process. That doesn’t seem to be supported by our research. Even when they try to do that, that doesn’t help them overcome this gap in influence. And so that’s kind of a depressing thing to discuss, that there isn’t much women actually can do to change those kinds of outcomes when they find themselves in these settings where they’re underrepresented. That it’s really men’s attitudes and men’s behavior that seems to be changing when women are in the minority versus women in the majority. So in our study, it’s men that are evaluating women as more influential when they are randomly assigned to be in a group with more women relative to when they’re in the group with just one woman. But of course, these underlying causes are really structural. So if you were to ask me, you know, what can organizations do to avoid those kinds of consequences for them, and I would say, “Well, number one is they need to hire more women.” Creating an environment in which women are no longer in the minority is certainly the direct implication of our research. However, that might be the more longer term goal. If organizations, say a tech firm, says over time, “We’re trying to hire more women, but we just don’t even have enough qualified women in the pipeline. What can we do now? How can we fix this given that women are still going to be in the minority for a while…” Then thinking about the structures of the teams and how they’re assigned, but also the norms within those teams? So for example, my co-author Chris Karpowitz has done some research in the past about the norms of deliberation and whether teams make decisions by majority rule, or whether teams make decision unanimously. That seems to be really important to women’s ability to contribute in environments in which they’re underrepresented. So maybe restructuring some of the team norms so that decisions have to be made unanimously, such that women’s voices are heard and they’re able to contribute even when they’re in the minority.

John: One thing I’ve been thinking when I read your paper and during our discussion is that there’s a similar cultural issue that affects teaching evaluations. And there’s at least some research that suggests that the negative bias that students may have in evaluating female professors can be overcome somewhat when students are made aware of the existence of this. And one nice thing about studies like yours is that it is making people more aware of this. But it would be interesting to see if students were given information about this at the start of their group formation, if that may affect the way in which group behavior is formed.

Olga: I am aware of those studies and I like them very much, because they show us one way, an easy nudge, which can change behavior, in this case, in the context of student evaluations of teaching. So in our study, of course, we try to keep the framing about students’ participation in this research, very neutral. We didn’t want them to be primed that this was a study about gender dynamics in groups and things like that. But I can envision future work thinking about the next step, which is what can be done to reduce this gender gap, what can be done to improve outcomes for women when they do find themselves in the minority, and one of those could be making students aware then making these patterns a lot more salient. Because honestly, if you probably ask a lot of the students whether they think that women in these groups are incurring any kind of penalty, they would probably say, “No.” The majority of the male students would probably not think that these things are happening. They’re happening in a subconscious basis, not through explicit discriminatory practices. It’s certainly possible that some male students are explicitly discriminating. But one measure that we have of that is how satisfied students are with their groups. And what we find is actually, regardless of the condition in which women are in, they report very high levels of satisfaction with their group. So even when they’re in the minority, and we can see that they’re incurring this really strong cost or deficit of influence, they still report being equally satisfied with their groups, and as happy with the group interactions as the women in the majority. So it seems that even the women themselves are not often recognizing that these deficits are occurring, let alone the male students in the group.

Rebecca: They’ve experienced it forever, it doesn’t seem different, right? [LAUGHTER]

Olga: That’s right, and this is not the first setting in which they’re experienced in this. There’s research showing that these kinds of patterns exist as early as school levels, where difference in competition is found as early as kindergarten, basically. And so the socialization that takes place even prior to college is probably conditioning women to feel that that is a normal kind of environment.

Rebecca: Your study reminds me a lot of conversations around all girls schools in K-12 and some of the benefits of that for women and also thinking about compositions of committees and things that might exist in professional environments where they’re trying to diversify, and they diversify by having token representation. And we often see that that can be problematic, but this is demonstrating other ways in which it can be problematic, which I think is a lot of interesting food for thought.

Olga: Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the biggest motivation… thinking about this is when you look at these policies, both private and public initiatives that are aiming to diversify these settings, like school boards or corporate boards, political assemblies, often, like you said, the solution is let’s just add one or two token women or minorities to the setting to help us be more diverse, and certainly we wanted to know what impact is that having on the women that are added, the women that become those token or lone members of the group and it’s not looking great. [LAUGHTER]

John: It’s a cultural issue and cultural changes tend to be slow. And as you said before, the only real solution is to have more balanced representation in all groups.

Olga: Absolutely. Yeah. And often, of course, what you hear, especially in the private sector is, “Well, it’s a meritocracy. Everybody can apply for these jobs, and we’re just not finding enough qualified women. And you know that certainly could be a valid concern in some stages of application process, but it is an important hurdle to overcome and think about how do we get more women into the funnel? How do we make sure that our women persist through the application process and actually make it into these jobs, because there are barriers at different levels, at different stages of that process that lead to these gender disparities in the share of women that go into these occupations, it’s not all choice. Choices are made, not in a vacuum, they’re made based on the constraints and information that people have. And so making these environments more appealing, more welcoming to women, should be an important objective of any organization that is struggling to increase diversity, gender diversity, in their rank and file.

Rebecca: As someone who teaches when an area of design that is also not balanced, [LAUGHTER] I teach in a more tech heavy side, it’s much more male dominated, because there’s more code and stuff involved and so historically, there’s less women, I’m thinking about all the group work that I do in my own classes, in the context of your research, and thinking about how productive and exciting it’s been to see some groups of all women, and what that looks like and what that feels like. But also having that little voice in the back of your mind saying maybe we need diverse teams that represent different kinds of people, because we’re designing for different kinds of people. And that, for the benefit of males in the class of interacting with women, maybe it benefits them, but they already have a benefit. And so that’s a really interesting consideration that I don’t think we often think about… not in a systematic way… or thinking about groups. I thought about majors and all kinds of things when I was formulating my groups, but I didn’t necessarily think about this.

Olga: Yeah, and I think that’s very common, especially in environments where there are serious binding constraints, you only have a few women. So I’m at BYU, and we have our share of women in the majors only about 20%. So any faculty trying to form group is going to be faced with these really serious constraints. One thing I would say is, in addition to this quantitative evidence that has been generated over the years showing how harmful it may be for women to be in the minority, there’s also, in our study, some qualitative evidence that we find. And since we’ve presented this study in different places, it’s been such an interesting experience, because you get these women just nodding their heads and saying, “I know exactly how this feels having been in the minority, and having compared my experience as a woman in the majority, just how much more heard and influential I feel in those kinds of settings.” So I think compiling qualitative evidence, pointing to the fact that it is significantly more difficult for women in the minority in these group settings to exert their influence and to get their voices heard.

John: Are you thinking of extending this research to other areas in terms of say race or other categories in which there may be similar effects?

Olga: Yeah, absolutely. So the original study certainly can only speak to gender, we have very few non-white students in the sample and can’t say very much since they weren’t randomly assigned across the group composition. But our goal long term is to look at whether these patterns extend beyond the gender domain. My guess is that we’re going to find very similar patterns for racial minorities, for example, who find themselves being underrepresented in many kinds of similar settings. They may even be exacerbated relative to the gaps that we find for women. And so we’re very interested, we’re in conversations with one firm and another institution trying to design a study that might work but this is a work in progress. And I hope it happens, because certainly we want to know whether other kinds of minorities find themselves in similar predicaments when they are underrepresented.

Rebecca: It also seems like it would be interesting to know whether or not, if you have multiple people from different underrepresented groups, if that somehow starts treating that more as a majority of underrepresented people, or if it’s just specific to a particular group at any given time.

Olga: Yeah, that’s a good point. One thing that we are doing is we do have a study in the field that is sort of following up from their original study, which includes the groups in which women are still in the minority, but they’re not the only woman. In our original setting there’s either one woman and four men, or three women and two men. So it’s not a symmetric kind of setting. And that’s by design, because there’s so few women in that program that if we created two women groups we wouldn’t have enough sample size to confidently say whether these results are statistically significant. But in the follow up study that we have been doing in the field, actually, for the last year and a half, we do have groups with two women and groups with two men. So we can compare sort of more symmetric, does it help to have another woman in a team? Or does it not make a difference, because you’re still in the minority. Some preliminary findings that we have, are that, unfortunately, it’s not tipping the scale… that unless women are in the majority, they’re still going to incur those deficits in terms of influence. And that’s supported by some of the prior laboratory research. But this is still ongoing… so, unfortunately, not the full findings yet. Another interesting extension of this work that we have started implementing, sort of by accident, or by necessity, rather, when COVID head and a lot of the group interactions have moved online… our entire lives have moved on to virtual settings… we wondered whether these same patterns would be exacerbated in virtual settings. There’s some anecdotal evidence that it’s even harder for him to get their voices heard in these kinds of settings. And so the study that we had been running in person has been turned into a study using Zoom as a platform. So we can now, at the end of this semester and next semester, say something about whether these patterns are different in online settings versus actual face-to-face settings, and what kinds of additional burdens may fall on the women when they’re having to influence outcomes or participate in the deliberative process in an online setting.

Rebecca: …sounds fascinating.

John: It’s a great natural experiment. …let me rephrase that… [LAUGHTER] we should probably not refer to the pandemic as a great experiment…

Olga: I know.

John: …but it does provide an interesting source of data on that issue, and virtual work is likely to become much more common in the future anyway.

Olga: Absolutely. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to go away. Even if the pandemic ended today, people are getting used to these kinds of interactions. There are advantages to them in terms of flexibility and the kinds of geographical constraints that no longer seem to apply. But they may also have these unintended hidden costs that I think are important to be able to quantify, particularly as it relates to these gender and racial disparities that already exist in a lot of these settings and workplaces.

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

Olga: So this study has really led us to think carefully about these gender disparities, and to try to understand what kinds of interventions can help improve the outcomes for women. So the next step is certainly for us to try to test and evaluate the effectiveness of some of these interventions. So for example, I mentioned we’re doing a study in the field using Zoom as a platform for team meetings, we’re playing around and designing different kinds of changes in group norms, which operates through Zoom on, for example, who gets to start the conversation, or timing each participant in the group, so they know how long they’ve been speaking for… things that have been possible through technology, and trying to see whether those kinds of interventions will help improve the outcomes for women when they’re in the minority. So that’s one direction in which we are continuing this research agenda. And then another one, of course, is looking at other kinds of minority status. So particularly looking at race, we’re very interested in collaborating either with firms or other institutions that have ethnic or racial minorities, and are interested to know what implications do these settings have on their minority employees or students?

Rebecca: Looks like a lot of great work coming down the pike. I’m excited to hear what you find.

Olga: Thanks, Rebecca, thank you so much.

John: You’re doing some wonderful work, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of it in the future.

Olga: I really appreciate it. Thank you guys. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much.

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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181. Capstone Experience

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

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

Show Notes

Transcript

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

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

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

Katy: Thanks so much for having me on again.

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

Katy: I’m having a decaf Earl Grey.

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

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

Rebecca: I really like almond teas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katy: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: Sounds like a really fun class to teach.

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

Rebecca: Mm hmm. I love my projects classes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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180. Google Apps

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

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

Kathleen: Hi, John. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Hi.

John: It’s good to see you again.

Kathleen: It’s good to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

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

Rebecca: I picked right up on that, Kathleen.

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

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

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

Rebecca: Yeah, it was for you guys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathleen: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: Thanks for coming. We appreciate it.

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

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

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123. New Trends in Science Instruction

Posted in active learning, authentic learning, collaborative learning, K-12, learning, math ed, pedagogy, STEM, teaching
March 4, 2020

Science instruction in K-12 education has long been provided as if science consisted of a body of facts to be memorized. The Next Generation Science Standards, however, rely on an inquiry-based approach in which students learn about science by engaging in scientific exploration. In this episode, Dr. Kristina Mitchell joins us to discuss this approach and its implications for college instruction.

After six years as a director of online education at Texas Tech University, Kristina now works for a science curriculum publishing company and teaches part time at San Jose State University.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Science instruction in K-12 education has long been provided as if science consisted of a body of facts to be memorized. The Next Generation Science Standards, however, rely on an inquiry-based approach in which students learn about science by engaging in scientific exploration. In this episode, we discuss this approach and its implications for college instruction.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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John: Our guest today is Dr. Kristina Mitchell. After six years as a director of online education at Texas Tech University, Kristina now works for a science curriculum publishing company and teaches part-time at San Jose State University. Welcome back, Kristina.

Kristina: Thank you. It’s good to be back.

Rebecca: Today our teas are…

Kristina: Diet Dr. Pepper.

John: The same as last time. [LAUGHTER] I have a green tea today.

Rebecca: And I have a nice pot of brewed English Breakfast tea.

John: We’ve invited you here today to talk about the Next Generation Science Standards. How did you get involved with the Next Generation Science Standards?

Kristina: During my work at Texas Tech University in online education, I was doing a lot of consulting for publishing companies on their online and curriculum offerings, which led to a full-time job offer from a curriculum company that works specifically in K-12 and some higher ed science curriculum, and I learned very quickly that one of the newest trends in science education at the K-12 level are these Next Generation Science Standards that were created by college-level science professors in order to change the way we teach science to K-12 students.

John: How did these standards come about?

Kristina: I have to admit that because I’m relatively new to the science curriculum world, I am not an expert on their creation. But I do know that there were several panels of scientists from various higher education institutions that got together to try and figure out from the perspectives of different disciplines, “What do we want our students who come to university to know about science once they get there?” When I was in middle school, I don’t know how much you remember your middle school science lessons, but I remember dissecting frogs and doing our Punnett squares about genetics, but what I remember most is that we would learn those principles of science like Newton’s laws throughout the week, and then Friday, we would do a lab to prove that they were true. And unfortunately, that’s not how any of us do science. Being a social scientist myself, that’s not how I did science at the college level, as a researcher. So, the panel of experts from various scientific disciplines sought to change the way students think about science to think about it more as a process of investigation, rather than something you sort of memorize and then confirm.

Rebecca: The Next Generation Science Standards have three dimensions. Can you talk about those a little bit?

Kristina: Sure. So, these sort of three dimensions, or the three pillars of the way students are learning in K-12 about science, the first is they’re learning disciplinary core ideas. So these disciplinary core ideas are the core features of disciplines like physics or chemistry and the things that they really have to know about that specific discipline in order to build on that knowledge. The second one is science and engineering practices, so these are the ways we study science. And the great thing about the ways that we study science is that it doesn’t change across disciplines. Whether you’re a physicist or a chemist or a sociologist, you’re going to use the same types of scientific practices to answer your research questions. And then the final dimension, the third dimension, are cross cutting concepts. So, these are things like observing patterns or observing cause and effect, concepts that also span across all disciplines, not necessarily limited only to science. So it’s concepts that students can use to understand the world around them, regardless of what questions they’re asking.

Rebecca: Can you give us an example of how these three dimensions play out in a particular grade level?

Kristina: Sure. So when we’re thinking about what students are doing in science classrooms these days that might be different from the way we learned science when we were in seventh grade, students are doing a lot more investigation centered science. So, you walked into your classroom, your college classroom, and somebody walks in and says to one of your students, “What are you guys doing?” And your student might say, “Oh, we’re reading this chapter on…” Rebecca, I think you’re an art person, right?

Rebecca: Yeah, design.

Kristina: “So we’re reading this chapter on Photoshop,” and you ask them, “Okay, well, why are you doing that?” And they’d say “Well, because Professor Mushtare told us to.” In trying to get them away from that instead, the way they’re trying to implement science in the classrooms now would be to get students, you know, if they came into your classroom to say, “Well what are you guys working on?” And they might say, “Well, we’re trying to make a flyer for this project.” And you’d say “Why?” And they’d say, “Well, because we’re trying to figure out how we can make people more excited in this project that we’re working on.” So, getting students to start from the point of “What are we trying to figure out and why do we have to do this activity in order to figure that out?” …rather than “What are we memorizing, what are we learning because the teacher told us to?”

John: So it’s more of a project-based learning or inquiry-based approach to the discipline.

Kristina: Absolutely. And we’ve seen that a lot emerging in higher ed. So, it’s really great to see it reflected in the K-12 space too.

John: But it’s important probably for faculty to be aware of this, because if students are starting to use this approach, as they move forward, they might expect to see more of that in higher ed, where they might see it as a step backwards if they have to move to something that involves more rote learning, for example.

Kristina: Exactly. We’re seeing a lot less “sage on the stage”-type activities, both in K-12 and in higher ed. So it’s really important, I think, that we all kind of know what both sides of education are doing so we can at least know where our students are coming from.

Rebecca: How do you see this new approach helping students be better prepared for college?

Kristina: Well I definitely think that the idea of empowering students to be in charge of their own knowledge is really important. Sometimes I find that a struggle that my students have is doing this sort of figuring things out on their own. If I don’t give explicit instructions with explicit rubrics, they sometimes feel very lost. And so empowering them to recognize themselves as people who can ask questions and figure out the answers to those questions, that goes far beyond just physics class. That goes into just being a responsible and productive member of society. So, I think hopefully we can see students taking a little bit more ownership in their learning because of these trends at K-12.

John: Does it also perhaps give students a little more motivation when they have a goal in mind, and they know why they’re doing things rather than just doing it because their instructors told them to?

Kristina: Yeah, I would definitely think so. I definitely remember my seventh grade year not being passionate about the science, other than “Wow, cool. It’s a dead frog.” So thinking about empowering students to ask these questions might get them more excited about what they’re learning about.

John: In one of our earlier podcasts, we talked to Josh Eyler, who emphasized the importance of curiosity and nurturing curiosity and this approach seems to be very nicely tied into that.

Kristina: Absolutely. And I think about my own political science classroom. One of the fun activities I’ve done and I swear the first time I went through it, it was one of those days where I thought, “Ah… I’m tired. I don’t have anything that I’m interested in lecturing about. We’re almost through this semester, what am I going to do today?” And so I decided, I’m just going to have the students write questions on index cards related to political science and hand them all in and I’ll answer all of the ones that I can. And that was one of the best days of class. I’ve recreated that many times in semesters. And so seeing that these Next Generation Science Standards where we’re trying to get students to think there are some things you learn about each discipline, but there are some practices and concepts that apply everywhere and you just learn how to ask the right questions and you use these concepts and practices to answer them. It’s something that I’m using in my political science class, even really, before I realized that I was specifically doing so.

Rebecca: Do you have any idea how students are responding to this curricula?

Kristina: So every individual curriculum and program is going to be a little bit different, but they are all going to tie into these main ideas. And one thing that we’ve seen in student performance and student preferences is that the students really like doing things in class, having activities and hands on specifically to science. Of course, that often means labs. But one thing that I often talk to teachers about and get a lot of really good feedback on is the idea that we kind of think of doing science looks like it’s in lab coats with safety goggles, but we all know as researchers ourselves that science looks like talking sometimes. And sometimes it looks like asking questions, and sometimes it looks like taking notes or revising models, and getting the teachers and students to realize that that’s all part of what doing science is. They get really excited at the idea of doing science themselves. Of course, they like to see things explode in class, but sometimes just getting them the opportunity to have discussions with each other. It’s amazing to me what the middle school students are capable of, and our elementary age students, what they’re capable of. I have kids myself and I didn’t know that they were learning such higher level concepts of science in class.

Rebecca: There’s big movements to move STEM to STEAM. Is the humanities represented in this new model?

Kristina: So, when we think about STEM, that’s kind of what everyone’s prioritizing these days: the science, the technology, engineering and mathematics… and the A to add it to STEAM would be the arts. So the idea that the arts are also important, but I think there are some key pieces missing here. When we focus exclusively on STEM and on creation and innovation, that’s really good. We need creation and innovation. But as I feel like sometimes we’re learning right now, without a good background knowledge of history, we might be creating and innovating things that either already exist, or have already been tried, or that don’t have a good basis in what we’ve experienced as a society. It’s like they said on Jurassic Park, you spend so much time wondering whether you can and you don’t stop to think about whether you should.

Rebecca: So you were just raising that question about ethics and things like this. So,how do you see this curriculum evolving so that the humanities are better represented or integrate more into our integrated learning in K through 12?

Kristina: Well, one thing that I think is really great about the NGSS is that it definitely starts to sort of de-silo the disciplines of science. So, when we think about physics and chemistry and earth science and life science, when I was in school, those were all completely separate years, both in middle school and in high school. And the NGSS standards definitely start to recognize that we can’t silo our disciplines like that because they have so much to speak to each other. Some questions you need many disciplines of science to answer. And so I’m hoping that slowly, more and more curriculum writers will apply that same standard to the humanities, to the social sciences, and to the arts, the idea that nothing can truly be siloed because social science speaks to even questions like “What scientific research do we do? What research questions do we ask?” That can’t be explained using natural sciences alone. Because yes, natural sciences might seem really unbiased, but we’re asking certain questions and we’re not asking others. So using social science and humanities to help answer those bigger questions. I’m hoping that we see less siloing across disciplines over time. And even at universities, we’re starting to see increases in things like cluster hires, where multiple people from different disciplines all come at a sort of similar question, kind of like what we’re doing here. We’re three people from very different disciplines. But we’re all interested in the question of, you know, what makes teaching good or bad.

Rebecca: One of the questions that’s risen a lot in higher ed, and I know as a popular conversation on our campus, is about fake news and debunking pseudoscience. Do you see that this curriculum helps with that,? …perpetuates that?

Kristina: I think that’s a really good question, and kind of a difficult one, because I think it’s really important to teach students how to interpret the world around them, and what science is and how it’s done, because that can help us determine the validity of the information that we get. But I also think, like we were just talking about, there is a move away from rote learning, from the idea that an expert in a field tells us what is true about that field and we learn it. The fact that we’re moving toward anyone can be an expert, anyone can do the research themselves, anyone can ask questions. Sometimes, I also worry that that pendulum might swing too far, because that’s sometimes where we get people who go online and find whatever Google can tell them about vaccines not being safe or about climate change not being real. And because they feel empowered to be their own expert, they’re treating themselves and their research as equivalent to people who have devoted their lives to getting advanced degrees and who know the answers to these questions. And so I worry that maybe we’ll see the pendulum swing a little too far in the other direction, but I’m not sure.

Rebecca: Based on knowing what you know about higher ed and what you know about this science curriculum, what do you think faculty should be thinking about in terms of what their students might know or might not know, or how they might know differently than they did before?

Kristina: I think that it’s important to teach students what expertise is to begin with, when we think about what it means to be an expert and know something. So, when we go back to those next generation science standards, and think about those three dimensions, the disciplinary core ideas, to me, those are the things that experts already know and that we can accept as the core ideas of each discipline. So, starting from that point and saying the question of vaccine safety has already been established, we know that the vaccines that are here are safe. That’s a disciplinary core idea. But now let’s use our science and engineering practices and our cross-cutting concepts to think about other types of preventative medicine that maybe don’t have the same consensus or new types of vaccines? How would we know that those are safe or how would we know that those are effective? So, I think it’s important not to forget about those disciplinary core ideas that are things that experts have already figured out questions that have already been settled, and then allowing people to start from that point and ask their own questions and do their own research using the scientific method.

John: Changing the topic just a little bit, we get a fair number of people who are interested in the STEM fields when they’re in middle school and even high school, but then they get to college, and all of a sudden, they have to start taking calculus classes, and Matrix Algebra, and Organic Chemistry. Is there any way that perhaps lessons learned from this approach could be used to make college classes more effective and not having so many people get lost along the way once they hit these courses that have been traditionally a bit of a barrier to progress in those areas?

Kristina: That’s a really great question, and we even see that in political science. I teach our research methods class in political science and it has just the tiniest bit of statistics in it. And students are like, “Why am I doing math in a political science class?” And then of course, in graduate school, we’re seeing increasing amounts of quantitative knowledge needed to finish graduate programs and then to compete on the job market. So, I definitely think that the rise of math as something important is a deterrent to some students who might otherwise be interested in entering STEM or social science fields, but I think that also comes down to the pendulum again. I think that it’s important to realize that quantitative methodology is a method of understanding scientific questions, and you don’t have to use quantitative methodology to answer every scientific question. Some of them can be answered using qualitative methods, and even discussing political theory or other types of theories in other sciences or in the humanities. I think it would be good if we could open up the doors a little bit to people who have really high level intelligence and interest and curiosity, but maybe don’t have an interest in math. I think both by making math more accessible and less required, we might be able to get some really interesting new perspectives in our college level courses. I don’t like the idea of using hard math classes as a way to weed students out. And I think that’s sometimes what they’re used for, because I took Matrix Algebra in grad school, and it was really hard. And I’ve never used it since that class… ever again. So it’s not as though it was a skill I needed to be a PhD in political science. It felt more like a class that was used to weed out students who weren’t as interested or weren’t as good at memorizing how to do Matrix Algebra.

John: The point I was trying to get to, I think, is that perhaps if more of these inquiry-based methods were used to motivate the material, it could help get past that. I actually had a similar experience with Matrix Algebra. And when I was learning, I was able to do the proofs and work through it, but I didn’t really understand it until I started using it in econometrics and other disciplines, when all of a sudden it just made so much sense and why all those theorems were there and useful. But we lost a lot of people along the way there. And perhaps that’s something we could build into all of our classes to help motivate students and not just hit them with a lot of theorems and not necessarily even just rote learning, but a lot of inquiry for which the motivation may not be obvious to people when they take it.

Kristina: Definitely. And I think that when I teach my Statistics and Research Methods class, it always is easier for the students, and they always do better, when I tie the math we’re doing to a real question. So even something as simple as “We’re trying to figure out whether the average American is conservative or liberal,” and this is our question that we’re trying to figure out. Now we need to do a difference of means test to figure it out. And so that would be, going back to what we were saying earlier, the idea of you walking into my class and asking my students what they’re doing. Well, they could answer “We’re memorizing how to do a difference of means test from chapter 12 because Dr. Mitchell told us to,” versus saying, “Well, we’re trying to figure out what the ideology is of Americans from different regions, so we have to use this mathematical test so we can answer that question.” So really about framing it in terms of “What are you doing and why are you doing it?” and making sure that we know that the students would answer in a way that gets them excited about the material.

Rebecca: I think context is everything. The real world problems that you’re talking about in the new science curriculum is not unlike the kinds of things that you’re talking about in your classes or even when you have to use math in design class. So, a lot of visual arts students think math is completely irrelevant to them, but when it’s put in context, when you need to do certain things, all of the sudden it makes more sense. I teach a creative code class and we do fairly complicated geometries there, actually. And if you can see the results, sometimes it makes a lot more sense to some of our students.

Kristina: Exactly. So the fact that they would know why they’re doing this and it’s to accomplish a specific goal, rather than just “We’re memorizing this because the professor told us we had to, it was going to be on the exam.”

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Kristina: Lord, help us for how many times we hear “Is this going to be on the exam?” That seems like the motivation for trying to learn something. And it would be great if we could move it away from that being the motivation, toward the motivation being “Well, we’re trying to learn this because it helps us figure out this question or this design problem.”

Rebecca: Or the motivation, like, “Hey, I really need to understand this mathematical principle, because I really want to know the answer to this question.”

Kristina: Exactly.

Rebecca: And that leads to where they actually start asking for the things that we’ve prescribed previously. [LAUGHTER]

Kristina: Yeah, and it becomes just a tool to figure things out. And if they want to figure the answer out, then they’re going to need all the tools.

John: Could you tell us what this would look like if we were to stop by a seventh grade class, and this was being put in practice?

Kristina: Absolutely. So if we think about what a seventh grader might be doing, so if we start from that point of the goal is to figure something out, and maybe they’re learning about Space science. They’re learning about Earth and Space and trying to figure out “Why do some objects in Space orbit other objects?” …like “What does that mean? How does that happen?” So, one really fun activity that I’ve seen middle schoolers doing is they have these embroidery hoops and these marbles. And so what they do is they put the marble in the embroidery hoop, and they sort of spin it around on the table. And so the marble is swirling in circles and then they lift the hoop and marbles start shooting everywhere. So it’s very funny in a seventh grade classroom, because you got kids running everywhere trying to chase their marbles. And so at first, they’re just having fun, tracking which way the marble goes and trying to figure out when they lift the embroidery hoop which direction will the marble head, and then eventually they start realizing, “Oh, well, the marble kind of wants to go straight, but the embroidery hoop is keeping it going in a circle.” So, if we think about the sun, with the planets orbiting it, if the sun suddenly disappeared, Earth would kind of want to go straight out in whatever direction it was headed. But because the sun’s gravity’s in the middle, it’s keeping Earth going in a circle around the sun. And so they start putting these pieces together and eventually they come up with this idea of the relationship between inertia, which keeps the earth going, and gravity, which is what keeps it in that same orbit. When they think about what is the core idea they’re learning about, well, they’re learning about orbit, but the way they’re figuring it out is by looking at this small model of what is actually happening at the planetary level. And that’s really reflective of the kinds of things that scientists do in their labs. We’re running models that try to simulate what’s happening in space, or what’s happening in the political world, or whatever discipline we’re doing. We’re trying to create these models to help us understand it. And so that’s what the students are doing, too.

John: That reminds me of a talk that Eric Mazur has given in several places, including at Oswego, where he talked about the Force Concept Inventory, and how, while students were able to plug numbers into formulas and solve problems very well, when they were asked about questions like that, specifically, if I recall, “Suppose that you’re swinging a rock on a sling, and you release it, what would the motion look like?” And basically it ends up flying in essentially a straight line… well, other than the effect of gravity. But when people were asked that, they would bring up things that they had seen in cartoons where they expected it to loop through the air, perhaps as it’s moving. That’s actually one of those things where people in really good institutions who had taken a college class had some really poor intuition. And this type of practice can help prepare them with better intuition on which to build later.

Kristina: There was also a video at, I think it was Harvard’s graduation, where they asked a bunch of STEM majors who had just graduated if they thought they could make a little circuit that would light up a light bulb. And so they handed them everything they would need to do, and everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I got this no problem.” And they couldn’t, they couldn’t figure out how to light the light bulb up, because as much as they had done the math in class, they just had never really done the practical aspect. And so getting students hands-on to do the things with those science and engineering practices in whatever discipline we’re in. It’s really important to get our students in the driver’s seat to start practicing what they’re going to be doing when they leave the classroom.

Rebecca: It also seems like having multiple pathways to the same information is a good way to play with our memory, and make sure that it sticks and it stays there. So, something that’s embodied, something that you memorize, something that’s a couple different kinds of examples.

Kristina: Exactly. Maybe it can move it from our short-term back to the long-term memory to help us keep that knowledge.

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

Kristina: So I think I’d really like to start exploring what this does look like in a classroom setting for myself. So rather than just focusing on what it looks like for students in K-12, I’d like to see if I can use a similar style of teaching in my political science classroom, and just see what kinds of evaluations I get and how the students like it. I think the idea of getting rid of these silos and recognizing that we all use the same practices and concepts could help us with keeping our college experience for our students interesting and consistent. And we start realizing that they’re going to learn in each of our disciplinary core ideas, but there are a lot of things that we all have in common. So, I’m really going to try this semester, maybe my student evaluations will suffer greatly, but we all know from my past talks that they’re biased anyway. But I just kind of want to see what it looks like if I let my students take a little bit more of a driver’s seat in asking the question, “What are we going to figure out? What do we want to know about the world?”

Rebecca: Do you have a piece of this semester that you’re most excited about that you already have planned in this domain?

Kristina: Well, I’m doing the research methods class this semester, which of course, involves some math. And I think that I would like to use their ideas about what kind of data we should be looking at and what kind of questions we should be answering. Because I think that’ll make it a lot more meaningful for them, rather than if I say, “We’re going to look at the American national election study,” letting them figure out “What question do you want to answer?” And then I’ll teach them whatever method it is that they need to know in order to answer that question. So, we’re going to try it. We’ll see how it goes.

John: In a past podcast, Doug Mckee talked about a similar situation in his econometrics class where he was using a time-for-telling approach. Where basically you face students with problems and let them wrestle with it a bit before giving them some assistance and helping them resolve things, and there’s a lot of evidence that those techniques can be really effective.

Rebecca: So, it sounds like well wishes on your new adventures. [LAUGHTER]

Kristina: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for joining us.

Kristina: Of course, this is great. It’s always great. I think eventually I’ll have to come visit y’all.

John: That would be great. Well, 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. Editing assistance provided by Brittany Jones and Savannah Norton.

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114. Dead But Not Buried

Posted in authentic learning, collaborative learning, faculty-led travel, higher education, interdisciplinary projects, learning, pedagogy, teaching
January 1, 2020

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Travel courses can provide an opportunity to experience a different part of the world through the lens of a particular discipline. In this episode, we discuss the rich interdisciplinary learning opportunities that may occur when faculty and students from two different courses and disciplines travel together.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

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Rebecca: Today our guest is Dr. Kathleen Blake, a bioarchaeologist, a forensic anthropologist, and an assistant professor in anthropology at the State University of New York at Oswego. Welcome Kat.

Kat: Thank you

John: Our teas today are:

Kat: I’ve got a ginger tea and a mug from the Czech Republic.

Rebecca: The perfect match for today. I’m drinking my English afternoon tea.

John: …and I’m drinking ginger peach black tea. We invited you here today to talk about your collaboration with Rebecca on an international travel experience for students. This collaboration started with your course “Dead but not Buried” with travel to Prague and Brno in 2017. Can you talk a little bit about this course?

Kat: Sure. This course came about because students were interested in bone churches, which are churches that are found all throughout Europe, but there’s one particular beautiful one in the Czech Republic. And I thought “How can I make this into a course, basically?” And so I was looking at to make it into an anthropological framework and the idea was to see how cultures interact with their dead, how they treat their dead and the different cultural aspects of living with the dead, in particular, if the dead are present and active in your culture, as they are in this case. And the class also examines the framework of the dead over time and burials over time, so we went as far back as Neanderthals up through modern times. So, it covered quite a wide range of different time periods.

John: How did this collaboration between the two of you get started?

Kat: I took the class the first time in 2017. And I went on my own. Rebecca and I had initially talked about doing it together. However, we weren’t able to.

Rebecca: Someone decided to have a baby. [LAUGHTER]

Kat: And so we decided that the second time around we would see if we can make this work, and in particular, I was looking for somebody outside of my area. I didn’t want someone in the social sciences, I wanted somebody outside of anthropology and outside the social sciences, and the more we got to talking, the more it seemed like a good fit.

Rebecca: So first, you started by showing me pictures of things that looked really cool, some interesting design things. So she clearly marketed at me, right? [LAUGHTER]

John: Including some dead things, right?

Rebecca: …including some dead things… that I found unusually interesting and got me enticed to figure out what this place was really about and started discovering and doing some research and finding out that Brno actually is quite a design hub… that I wasn’t aware of.

Kat: Through our discussions, I learned a lot more about art than I ever knew. And finding out that the Czech Republic in general is a really big design hub, right?

Rebecca: um-hmm.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about how the collaboration worked in terms of the two different fields?

Kat: We used the existing structure through International Ed (both the Q3 and Q4 structure), but Rebecca was in the Q3 structure.

Rebecca: So, our Q3 and Q4 classes are a half a semester class that then would have travel either during spring break or in May at our institution. So, I taught a Q3 class but we didn’t travel in spring break. We traveled in May all together as a big group.

Kat: And I taught the Q4, which was from spring break until the end of the semester. And then we traveled together. And we tried to encourage the students to sign up for both classes. So, there was some overlap of students, although not all the students signed up for both classes.

Rebecca: And we did that so that students could have up to six credits for their experience, and it would provide interdisciplinary perspective on a place. And so my class focused on design specifically, and designers in the Czech Republic and art forms in the Czech Republic and the histories of that. And then, obviously, I didn’t deal with the dead at all, actually in my class. [LAUGHTER].

Kat: And then I taught my course as normal. And we kind of found there was a little bit of overlap that we didn’t realize there would be through the course.

Rebecca: We did have some assignments that were in common between the two classes. So, that it would help facilitate students making the connections between the course material because all the students ultimately were exposed to at least some of the course material for both courses, even if they weren’t enrolled in both courses because we all traveled as a group. So we were gone for 12 days, and through that time, we visited a number of different sites, some that were more anthropology focused, some that were more design and art focused. But all students went to all of those places. And then there was a couple of things that they could choose to do on their own or explore on their own. And so that worked out, I think, pretty well. And we had some really surprising experiences. For example, we were in one bone church and Kat had set up the history and understanding of the place but then I had a whole bunch of students come up to me and asked me about analyzing the design aspects of the spaces that we were in, which was really interesting. And I found it bizarre because I was learning about the space… It was the first time I had been in it and certainly didn’t feel like an expert… but students were asking me questions about it. But, then I also heard them talking to each other. So, the design students were asking the anthropology students about what they were seeing, like what the bones were, what parts of the body they were from, I was asking the students the same kinds of questions and then they were asking the science students and anthropology students were asking the design students about visual aspects that we were experiencing

John: For those in our audience who are not familiar with bone churches, could you provide a description of what these are?

Kat: The one main bone church that’s probably the most famous is in Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. And this church was a church that had been consecrated and so it attracted a lot of burials, especially during the black plague. Later on, the graveyard became full and so they dug up all the bones and normally they would put them maybe underneath the church, but in this case in the 1800s, they decided to elaborately decorate the church with the bones creating chandeliers, swag, pyramids of bones, a coat of arms, all kinds of sculptures, so it was a way to elaborately decorate their actual church and they held church services in that location until about eight years ago.

John: Are there are some photos or photo albums that you guys have created that perhaps we could share with our listeners in the show notes.

Kat: Oh, definitely and the students came up with some really good ones, too.

Rebecca: We have a blog the students were contributing to. So, there was some research that happened in my class before we went. The students put together a research guide of contemporary sculptural work that we were going to go to and some building some architecture. But then they also did some reflections about some of the spaces that they had visited once we were there that were more related to Kat’s class.

Kat: And the design students were making comments about how beautiful the bones were… the natural structures, how symmetrical they were… just thinking of the body as more piece of art than it is a piece of anatomy in some way. So it was interesting to hear their comments.

John: You mentioned that students could get up to six hours of credit. Were the two quarter classes three credits or two credits? How did that work?

Kat: Each class was three credits. So a normal quarter class in our institution is three credits,

John: but then did they get additional credits for the travel component?

Kat: that part of the course so we would meet once a week for an hour and then the travel at the end is included in the course.

John: Okay, so that was required it wasn’t an optional component.

Rebecca: Correct. And then the benefit there for students is that it was two different courses, but the travel piece was identical. So, the actual physical going somewhere and the time required for that was only one time. But, there was different coursework for each course. Although we had one reflection journal that was the same across both courses.

John: How did students react to the experience,

Kat: I thought it was positive overall. We got some of the students who had never even heard of anthropology, all of a sudden interested in anthropology. And then we had some of the anthropology students who were interested in things like photography and art. And so were immensely interested in asking Rebecca a lot of questions about both.

Rebecca: I think we have a new photography minor as a result.

Kat: I think so. I think we also have a new art minor.

Rebecca: I think we might, yeah. [LAUGHTER] I think we found it really interesting. And you might think that the art students would band together or the anthropology students would band together, but that didn’t necessarily happen. Partly we were strategic about how we put room assignments and things together. But we had three first-year students that traveled with us that were from different majors. And they bonded really nicely together and were doing all kinds of things together.

Kat: And I think they’re still good friends to this day.

John: Now, we had an earlier podcast in which we talked to two people who had done several trips, and they talked about some of the logistical issues that came up. How did the logistics work with your trip?

Kat:I would say overall, the logistics worked really well. I think the most harried part was the air transport getting there. But once we hit the ground, we had things pretty well organized. We’re very well organized people. I think that’s part of it. We had everything organized down to a tee. And we built in a lot of free time, and that made a big difference.

John: And to be fair, the other people were pretty organized, but there were some airport delays and there were some students who disappeared for a while unexpectedly.

Kat: Thank goodness we didn’t have that.

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] In the past, I have had courses with travel that have had things that went awry. I had a flight that was detoured and had to let fuel out. And there were students sitting next to the window and could see the fuel spewing out. And that was kind of concerning for students who had never flown before. So, certainly I had some harried experiences as well. But, I think overall, not so much. The biggest struggle that we’ve had is one that I also had when I took students to India was actually heat. And then students, although we were trying to prepare them and reminding them about hydrating and things just had a really hard time dealing with warmer weather and walking around a lot.

Kat: And in much of Europe, in the Czech Republic, in particular, things are not air conditioned. So, I think that was an adjustment for many students. Part of the reason that I wanted another faculty along was because I think it’s good to have a second person there for support. In case something goes wrong, you’ve got that second person. I think it really makes a difference. When you’re planning a trip like that.

Rebecca: We had a couple students who weren’t feeling well. We had some sinus congestion stuff that seemed to be spreading amongst the group. There were students that weren’t feeling well but you know, we’re checking in… may have picked one of us to check in with It may not even be the faculty member that they knew the best initially.

Kat: I think that was the case, yes.

Rebecca: So, we were able to tag team that a little bit and help support those students when they weren’t feeling well.

Kat: And that’s the thing. The first time I traveled, I did have a student who was ill and I was busy at the hotel tending to her and I couldn’t be with the other students. So, I think having that backup is important

John: Kat, you had traveled before with this class. But, this time you did it with another faculty member. How was it different this time than in your past experience?

Rebecca: He really wants to know how big of a pain in the butt I am to collaborate with.

John: Oh no, that I know. [LAUGHTER] I know all of that. But, in general, how was the joint experience different from individual experiences?

Kat: Well, Rebecca’s probably the best travel buddy I could have picked, so that worked out really, really well. Not only just having a backup in case students need help but having someone that you can have a break with… the students can go off and do their thing and you can have, shall I say grown-up time on your own with another faculty member, I think, makes a huge difference. Before I was having dinner with the students… I was with them 24-7, and it just sometimes gets to be a little bit too much.

Rebecca: We also found that we were able to do some exploring and find some new potential options for students for future trips. So, we were quite busy. I think the students found it surprising how much walking we did after we walked with them all over the place. We did double the walking on a pretty regular basis.

Kat: Yeah, after dinner, we would just go explore. And we also use that to create challenges for the students. So we were using WhatsApp and we would send pictures of where we were, there was a certain art sculpture or something they were supposed to be finding. And we’d say, Hey, we found it. Have you guys found it yet and give them some challenges each day. So it was a good way for us to get out and about together but also to help students explore.

Rebecca: Yeah, to find different places, but also just to see the environments that they actually were in quite a bit because they were in some of those areas frequently, but not really paying attention to their surroundings as much as maybe we wanted them to. It became a little competitive. And I think there was one time that the students made it out to one of the sculptures that we had trouble finding.

Kat: Yes.

Rebecca: they found it before us…

Kat: Yes.

Rebecca: and then it…

Kat: …the Trabi at the German Embassy.

John: So, you had them do a little scavenger hunts after the regularly scheduled program?

Kat: Yes. And they weren’t hard or rigorous in any way. But we would give them challenges almost every day.

Rebecca: Although we started off with a gamified experience the first day. There are the signs above a lot of the buildings that were before there were numbers or a street sign with numbers, there were little pictures.

Kat: Most people weren’t literate. So…

Rebecca: Yeah. So, it’d be like the house of the Golden Bear or whatever. And so a lot of those exist still in the city of Prague. But there’s one street where there’s a lot of them. So we took them to that street the first day and told them how many that were on the street and gave them the challenge to find them and photograph and document them. But then that became a challenge to find more throughout the city during the week. So, Kat and I would find some like, “Oh, did you find this one yet?”

Kat: Yeah, we were often posting all different ones that they’d never seen, and then they wanted to know and we say, “Ah, but you have to go find it yourself.”

John: How did students do in a different language because I assume most of them were probably not fluent before the trip.

Kat: We tried, we had gotten Duolingo and required them to download it and to try to at least say a few phrases. But Czech is a very difficult language. Surprisingly, some of them picked up a few keywords. And I think they were all commenting that if they made even an attempt that the people were very kind to them, and then would switch to English pretty readily.

Rebecca: Yeah. And we had a particular level that we required students to meet in Duolingo for each of our classes. If you took only one class, it was at a certain level. And if you had taken both classes, it was at a slightly higher level. I’m not sure if we would have picked that same exact app next time, because some of the things that it prioritized in the early levels seemed really not that useful. So, I think we would need to explore a different option. I mean, it certainly had like “Hello,” “thank you,” “bathroom,” all those basic things. Yeah, there’s another Czech app through… I think it’s through the Czech embassy, that we also encouraged them to look up and that seemed to have more user friendly type phrases that would be helpful.

John: We have lots of classes that travel overseas, but not many of them involve this type of collaboration between two disciplines. What are the strengths of this model compared to a single disciplinary approach?

Kat: I would think one of the things is you’re drawing students that you would not normally draw… ones that had never even heard of anthropology were drawn to an anthropology class. I think it’s an opportunity to get students in a different discipline or even a different school that would not have been interested before. \

Rebecca: The classes that we offered were also at a higher level, they were like 300 level. So, at that level, I think students tend to navigate towards classes that there may be more familiar with the faculty. So, as the faculty teaching in the art class, I was then able to get those art students to register for Kat’s class and vice versa. We were able to encourage them to try something different. And we sat in on each class so I attended all of Kat’s classes and she attended all of mine and that also helped the students get familiar with both of us so that they would all be comfortable traveling with both of us. I think it enticed students because of the additional credits that they could get out of the experience. But, I think the real valuable part was traveling to all of those different locations with the mix of students and the mix of faculty that we had… because we had science, anthropology, and art…well, really design… design students.

Kat: …and the science students were geology, zoology, and biology. So, they were not all anthropology students. But, I think those anthropology students, and the bio and zoology all said that they learned so much more about art and design that they just weren’t even aware of before. So, I don’t think that would have happened otherwise. We’ve traveled to the same places, but Rebecca talked about the street with the signs. Well, I’ve taken students down that street before but we never noticed the signs. We never noticed the whole kind of street full of signs. So it brought a whole different level that was not there the first time.

Rebecca: And we ended up going to places that weren’t on your original itinerary either. Students expressed an interest in going to the anthropology museum when we were in Brno. And it was such a great connection between art and anthropology, we had no idea. But, in the first floor was an entire art exhibit. That was the whole focus. And then they had full to scale models of cave paintings up in an upper level that was really fascinating for art students who had seen pictures of these things like teeny tiny in their textbooks and things but kind of got to experience something, although it wasn’t like at the site, you could see him at scale and how it went on the contours of the wall, etc.

Kat: Yeah, they’ve made a 3D model of it. And even anthropology students who’ve seen this in pictures as well, to get a sense of the 3D nature of the cave drawings. And you could see how maybe a bison was created on a bump coming out of the wall. I think for all the students that brought a different dimension to it, whether they’re art or anthropology.

Rebecca: …and I think the students pushed us to do some different things too… like we decided, “Okay, we’re gonna figure out this public transportation in Brno” when we had originally thought about only walking and then gave everyone a challenge to take the train somewhere after we all took the train together somewhere.

Kat: We just gave them a day pass, and they used it. One whole group got lost, but they found their way back. And it was quite the adventure from what we heard. But, I think they all had a great time.

John: In upper-level classes, students are often in very narrow silos. And this got them out of those silos.

Kat: Yeah, definitely. And then we did something that I never in a million years would have done, and that was to go to a puppet show.

Rebecca: Which I thought was a terrible idea when we first sat down.

Kat: It was a terrible idea for the first five minutes of the puppet show. And then it turned into the most hilarious thing that we thought the students would hate and they absolutely loved.

Rebecca: Puppetry is an important art form in the Czech Republic. So, I thought it was important to expose students to this. So, I found a puppet show to go to but then we got there and it was this teeny tiny little theater, really hard chairs. And we sat down we’re like, “We’re only going to make them stay until like intermission right?”

Kat: Like, “Okay, they can leave as soon as we get to that intermission“ and I was surprised they all wanted to stay. They enjoyed it. They thought it was different, but interesting.

Rebecca: Well, because It was in Czech puppetry style, which has some interesting humor in it. But it was Don Giovanni… so in Italian.

Kat: So we couldn’t understand anything.

Rebecca: But, you could, actually, you totally could follow the storyline.

Kat: Sure. I don’t think we had any Italian speaking students to help us out, though.

Rebecca: No.

Kat: And this form of puppetry, you see the puppeteers, which made it even more interesting.

Rebecca: Yeah, it was like a behind-the-scenes tour while you were seeing the show. So I think the students found that really interesting.

John: Are you thinking about doing similar trips in the future?

Kat: We are thinking next time maybe of going to places like Spain or Italy or Portugal, which all have different types of bone churches, so ossuaries or different places like that. Maybe we can take this and modify it for a different location.

Rebecca: And I know that you brought some of the reflections that students had at the end to demonstrate the impact that it had on students. Do you want to share what some of those were?

Kat: Well, one of the students had a really interesting reflection that covered both of our topics. This was an anthropology student. But, one of the things he said was that it was how objects were displayed that was important. And I thought you could talk about bones that way. But you could also talk about the artworks. And that that is how you interpreted them and interacted with them. And I guess the first time I went, I didn’t think about interacting as something we were doing in the bone churches or ossuaries, but we were interacting with that space.

Rebecca: We ended up having a lot of conversations about one of them had music playing, and how that impacted the experience of the space versus if it had been quiet. So we ended up talking about all of those as designed experiences, and not just the visuals or the display of the bone.

Kat: Right, interpreting it on multiple levels. And so that got across to the students because they all seem to comment on that. Other students said that they had no idea what Art Nouveau or Cubism was, or even Soviet architecture and now that they did, and that was from a Zoology and Anthropology major, but they learned quite a bit about that. The Soviet architecture was interestingly blended in with everything else. And I think that’s one of the things I love about Prague and the Czech Republic is that mix of old and new and the students commented on that quite a bit. Another student talked about death and grief in clarifying life. She had just recently lost her grandmother and said that no one in her family would talk about the grieving process. And so she found this class very helpful to help her clarify her thoughts about that whole event in her life.

Rebecca: That was a student that took book classes, right?

Kat: Yeah.

Rebecca: One of the challenges that we gave students was to go into a grocery store and purchase something and then to write about that experience. And we found that they were hesitant to do that on their own. We ended up having to physically take them to the grocery store and go in with them.

Kat: Yes, but where they did open up was the farmers’ market. And every day in Brno, there’s a farmers market in the square and they loved that and were able to navigate that easily. So I don’t know what the difference is. If it’s just less threatening. Those people were less likely to speak English… that makes it interesting, but they seemed to enjoy that more.

Rebecca: We had a number of students that were not from a city and so grocery stores in cities are much smaller. And I think that the students were weirded out by that.

Kat: One of the things that was important through this whole class was that we weren’t just in major cities, so Brno’s the second largest city, Prague’s the largest city in the Czech Republic, but we also went to very small cities. So, students got to see all types of communities within the Czech Republic and I think that was important as well.

Rebecca: And Brno is a second largest city, but not a tourist destination by any means.

Kat: Not a tourist destination, no. And Brno, one of the comments that the students were making was the fact that they could see the homeless people… they were out and about near the train station, things like that. In Prague, they didn’t see that. They were probably there, but they just didn’t see it.

Rebecca: One of the things that we also did in Brno and that we didn’t do in Prague, in part because it’s a smaller place, is that we took students to a university there. It happened to be a design school or art school, but we took students inside and met with a faculty member and got a tour of the spaces and saw some student work. And all the students across all the disciplines found that to be really interesting and useful. So, we noted that next time we take students abroad, we need to make sure that we have some sort of opportunity for them to at least see a university space. We had trouble scheduling interactions between students, our students and their students, because of exam schedules and things. They were in exam time and most of the students weren’t around.

Kat: Yeah, we were not able to schedule with the forensic anthropologist or any of the anthropology faculty for that reason. So that’s the only downside of going this time of year is that that’s typically exam time for European schools.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about your preparation for the trip? I think you went there in advance to investigate places.

Kat: Well, Rebecca had never been there. I have been to Prague several times, I had traveled personally. And before I put the class together, I did take advantage of some funding that was available through our international education program to go and scout out locations. And I had looked at other places I’d looked at to Austria, Austria also has some bone churches. But it just seemed like the Czech Republic was a good fit and to stay in a stronger, more confined area, then to broaden it out, and maybe weaken the impact of it. And I had been to Prague, but I had never been to Brno until I scouted it out, I had not been to all of the small towns that I ended up using the first time around. And so for three of the small towns, it was the first time I’d ever been there when I arrived with students. It worked out okay. I don’t know if I would recommend it, but it did work out okay.

Rebecca: I think in general, I wouldn’t normally do an international class unless I had been there before. But because Kat had gone in this case, it worked out fine. I ended up having to do a lot of extra research on art and design. And I connected with a faculty member in Brno actually about art and design just to make sure we were kind of taking students to the right kinds of places and things because I couldn’t quite get a full sense, especially because that particular city is not tourist oriented. And so some stuff wasn’t even available in English. So, I had a little trouble navigating some of that, but it was a lot easier in Prague.

Kat: And what do you think having gone there the first time, what were your impressions that you wouldn’t have had if you hadn’t gone as a group?

Rebecca: I think it’s always different when you actually visit a place when you have that kind of three dimensional experience of what that feels like, smells like, tastes like. I was very excited that we found some Czech food that was gluten free that I can eat. I really wanted to be able to eat traditional Czech food, but I’m a celiac, so I can’t eat traditional Czech food. So, we were able to find a couple places that took a little extra hike on our part to get to those places.

Kat: But interestingly enough, the Czech Republic, and Brno in particular, are vegan hubs. Who knew? So, we had a couple of vegans with us, we had no problems at all because there were a lot of choices.

Rebecca: We also did all of our logistics, Kat took care of hotel and some transport in country and I think it’s helpful sometimes when it’s the faculty member that does that if you have an orientation as to where things are and how close they are so you can schedule things appropriately.

John: What have you learned? Or what would you like to try that you weren’t able to do this time?

Kat: I know we want to have a hotel with air conditioning next time in Prague. That’s going to be high on the list.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think the students have just such a difficult time dealing with the heat that they need a place where they get a little reprieve, so that they can be more energetic throughout the day. If you can’t get good sleep because you’re too hot at night, then the day becomes challenging. I think we’ll incorporate more challenges from the start. We know what to do challenges on. We tried some out, we know which ones fall flat. [LAUGHTER]

Kat: But, most of them were well received. And so I think we definitely will include those from the first day.

Rebecca: We talked about a different language app… that also seems very important, man. We didn’t have the anthropology museum on the schedule initially, but we will definitely go back there. That was a really good experience.

Kat: We were pretty good about scheduling free time. But I think there were a couple of days that we made notes that we would want to expand the free time that the students had or switch things around the order of when we went to different places. And we did find out that most of the places we wanted to go to in Brno were closed on Monday. That became an issue because we were there on a Monday. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: We certainly talked about the possible benefits of combining the class and making it just one class that’s the full semester with the travel. But I think the flexibility of having him be two separate classes is really worthwhile and that we’re still able to give all of the students at least some interdisciplinary experience even if they only end up in one of the courses.

Kat: And we’re going to make it more explicit on International Ed’s website next time that the two classes are connected. That seemed to be absent.

Rebecca: So we also talked about we had to use so many stairs…

Kat: Yeah, and many were outside or very narrow. And so claustrophobia and fear of heights need to be mentioned in our warnings. I had disclosed about stairs, but I didn’t consider the claustrophobia or fear of heights. But, it was something it that was not on my radar. The other thing we were talking about doing differently was instead of using a tour guide at the castle to give them a scavenger hunt at the castle, and then just plan to meet back.

John: We always end our podcast with the question, what are you going to do next?

Kat: I think the next is to plan our next trip to the Czech Republic, but also consider other locations, potentially Spain or Portugal or Italy…

Rebecca: …and get those right on the schedule, right?

Kat: That’s right.

Rebecca: I’m on sabbatical studying accessibility, which was also something that we looked at a little bit while we were in the Czech Republic, because there were a lot of places that were very not accessible. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you. This was interesting. And it sounds like you’ve got some future interesting trips, just to plan.

Kat: Thank you very much for having me.

[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.

109. Active Learning

Posted in active learning, collaborative learning, evidence-based practices, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, peer instruction, STEM, teaching
November 27, 2019

Moving from a familiar instructional format such as lectures to a more active learning environment can be daunting. In this episode, Dr. Patricia Gregg joins us to discuss how she flipped her classes and embraced active learning. Trish is an Assistant Professor of Geophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Moving from a familiar instructional format such as lectures to a more active learning environment can be daunting. In this episode, we share the story of one faculty member who fully flipped her classes and embraced active learning.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

John: Today our guest is Dr. Patricia Gregg. Trish is an Assistant Professor of Geophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Welcome.

Trish: Thanks for having me.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Trish: I am drinking a peppermint decaf tea.

Rebecca: …in what looks like a very nice handmade mug.

Trish: Yes! This was made last summer at the YMCA of the Rocky Camp in Colorado.

John: My tea today is a Harney and Sons chocolate mint.

Trish: Mhmm.

Rebecca: And I have a Prince of Wales tea today.

John: We’ve invited you here to talk about some of the active learning techniques that you’ve used in your class and also a little bit about how you use a flipped classroom approach. But, before that, could we talk a little bit about your own experience in science classes, and whether active learning was common while you were a student?

Trish: I was thinking about this and it’s interesting because it’s sort of a yes or no type of situation. Geosciences in general is the fun major in that we pull together a lot of different disciplines. So, you have chemistry and physics and math and computer science and you’re using those all in applied ways to understand the structure and evolution of the earth. And so our classes typically have a lecture-based meeting time and then a laboratory that’s associated with it. So, when I was matriculating, most of my classes, there would be three one-hour meetings throughout the week where we’d be lectured at, and then we’d have a three-hour laboratory class at some point during the week or a field experience that would help to apply some of the knowledge that we gained in the passive-learning setting. But, then as you get at higher levels, and things become more theoretical, it really did switch to more of this passive-learning mode. And I don’t want to age myself, but I matriculated a while ago, so I didn’t ever really experience these new active-learning techniques that have become so much more widely adopted nowadays. So, even through graduate school, most of the classes were me sitting passively scribbling furiously to try to take notes as quickly as I could, while a professor lectured and basically tried to stuff as much knowledge into my brain as possible. So, I didn’t really know a lot about the types of things that you can do to engage learners until after I was out of that student mode. But, yeah, geology is cool, though, because you still do have active portions where you get to go on field trips with your professors, and they show you things in the field and you apply that knowledge directly. But, in the classroom, it really was sort of divided, like, “This is your passive lecture that you’re going to sit and listen to, and you may never get called on through the entire semester.” And then “Here’s your lab where you will look at a microscope and look at hand samples or do other types of things that are a little more active.”

Rebecca: What motivated you to do something different in your own classroom?

Trish: As a graduate student, I really didn’t have a chance to do a teaching assistantship. I was on fellowships through most of my PhD time. So, I knew that I was woefully underprepared for entering academia and teaching my own classes. So, as a postdoc, I applied to this call that I saw out by the Center for Astronomy Education. And it was in 2011, they had this course called Improving College General Education and Earth Astronomy and Space Science through Active Engagement. And I saw the ad for this course and I thought, “Oh, this sounds great.” And then I saw that it was three days in Hawaii, and I said, “Oh, man, I must apply to this.”[LAUGHTER] And so I applied and it was mostly astronomy graduate students and postdocs, and the workshop was run by Ed Prather and Gina Brissenden out of the University of Arizona through the Center for Astronomy Education. And they had been doing all this amazing research about how to engage students in 100-level classes, mainly for the idea that they would sort of entrain new majors and new science students. But, it was just a mind blowing experience. I for the first time learned what think-pair-share was, I’d never heard of that before. We did lecture tutorials, I didn’t even know that was a thing. They did all of these, like voting and role playing and these different pedagogical things that I didn’t even know it existed. And they use them on us throughout the workshop. So, we were learning about these techniques through them actively using us as guinea pigs. And then we each had the opportunity to sort of develop a little module. They gave us specific astronomy, like 101-type things, that we would be teaching and we got to teach the other workshop participants and get feedback immediately on things that we didn’t do so well and things that we could improve on. But, it really just blew my mind. I think that was one of the most transformative experiences for me because, up to that point, all the experiences that I had, had been very research focused and how to improve as a scientist and how to improve my research approach, but I’d never had an opportunity to actually learn how to teach and how to teach effectively. So, yeah, I credit that three-day workshop in Hawaii, which was awesome… to be in Hawaii. It’s just sort of changing my entire worldview on how education can be and how I could be a better educator. Had it not been for the Center for Astronomy Education, I don’t know what I would be doing now. So, I think what I took away from it more than anything is that not every student is going to learn simply through lecture… passive engagement… type of situation. And I was fortunate that I seemed to do well in that mode, but it was amazing. I loved that workshop……. It was great.

Rebecca: It sounds really transformative. But, the one takeaway that I hear is next time we want a faculty member to change what they’re doing, we just need to woo them to Hawaii. [LAUGHTER]

Trish: Well, I have to admit that being a postdoc gave me some flexibility in that regard. So, yeah, when I saw that call, I was like, “Oh, I want to do that… three days in Hawaii.” I took my mom with me and she hung out and snorkeled during the day while I was in workshops. It was wonderful.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about some of the techniques that you’ve used in your classes?

Trish: The first semester that I taught, I was given a class that had already been developed and it was sort of easing me into that mode of becoming the head lecturer of a course. So, I didn’t really have a lot of wiggle room to change the curriculum yet, because I was still sort of learning how one gets in front of a class and does things. And so in that first term, I started to use some of the approaches that I had experienced through the Center for Astronomy Education, and sort of trickled them into my class. I use lecture tutorials and think-pair-share a lot during that term. And then I even used some small group activities and jigsawing to try to figure out ways that I could engage the students. And it was sort of a perfect situation to get my feet wet because I had the scaffolding of a well- developed course where I could put in some of my own ideas and try them out and if things weren’t working, I could get immediate feedback from the students and change my trajectory. I was also really fortunate that the students were super kind to me, it was my very first time teaching, I told them straight out. I was very communicative throughout the course. Every time I tried something new, I’d say, “okay, we’re going to try this. I don’t know if it will work, but this is why I’m doing it.” And the students were sort of brought in as collaborators in that process, so they didn’t see me as sort of this professor that was telling them “Oh, you’re going to do this, this and this and just follow along and trust me blindly.” They realized that I was trying to learn how best to teach them and so they were very helpful and when things didn’t work, they’re like, “Yeah that didn’t work.” And then when things went well, they say, “Oh, I really liked that.” And even after that semester, I’d get emails from students. They do a lot of journal reading and science reviews. And one of the students had emailed me over the summer and said “Oh, that really helped. At my first job they asked me to review some literature and I was able to use the template that you provided in class and what we did as groups to do that for my job.” So, I gained a lot of confidence through that process. And then after that first term, I started looking around campus to see if there were faculty development potential to help me to do a better job of developing my next courses. Because while that one had already been developed, I was then sort of slated to develop three new courses, which would be mine and I’d have to start from scratch and really think about how I wanted to develop my teaching as a portfolio. So, one of the things that I really wanted to try was this idea of flipping and mainly it came from a place that I didn’t enjoy lecturing. I would get bored hearing myself talk… like there would be times where I’m up there at the dry erase board writing out things and then suddenly I forget what I was saying, because mentally I’d fallen asleep at that point… like, alright, I’ve been talking so long, I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore. And I enjoyed the parts where we were actively learning as a group so much more. That was so exciting to me, where the students were doing things hands on, and I could walk around and help them to gain more insight on what they’re working on. So, I contacted the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning on campus and looked at the different things that they had available. And one of the facilities that they had advertised on their page was the Illinois iFLEX classroom. So, this is the Illinois flexible learning experience classroom. And I was able to get some training on how to use IFLEX classrooms from Dr. Eva Wolf here on campus. And that also then immediately changed my perspective of how teaching could be because these were classrooms where all of the tables were on wheels. So, you could move them around. They had monitors that students could plug in their computers or laptops, iPads or whatever too so that they could do collaborative learning. And she showed me some of the things that other faculty members were doing in these flexible spaces and it helped me to be inspired to think about what sorts of things I could do. So, as I started to develop my next class, I was like “Alright, I want to be able to use the computing facilities, I want to be able to use these flexible classroom configurations and I really want it to be flipped.” So, the first time I taught a flipped class, I recorded lectures and put them online and naively thought my students are going to watch them and they’re going to do the readings and they’re going to come to class prepared, and I did not have the assessment structured as such that the students had points awarded for doing those things. And boy did I learn quickly that students are not going to be these wonderfully motivated pupils that do all of the things on the list ahead of coming to class. So, I quickly spoke to colleagues around the department and found out about this edtech tool called PlayPosit. I don’t know have you guys had an experience with PlayPosit?

Rebecca: No.

John: That one I haven’t heard of.

Trish: So, PlayPosit is an edtech tool that you can integrate with a learning management system. We use Moodle on our campus. And you take your video lectures, and it embeds questions and prompts within your video lecture. So, students can’t fast forward and they don’t know when these questions are going to pop up. But, it’s a way to assess how they’re doing with the video… with the lecture as they’re watching it. So, sometimes I’ll use multiple-choice questions. In the upper-level classes I mostly use essay questions because I really want them to delve into the topic a little bit more. I also sprinkle in questions from the readings that they’re supposed to do because it’s another way to assess that they’re actually looking at the text or reading the papers that I’ve suggested. And then at the end, it’s great because you can put in some questions about what concepts did you not understand? What do you want to learn more about? Are there sticking points that are kind of confusing you? And this fed directly into learning about the just-in-time teaching method. So, I could have these PlayPosits that the students had to watch before class and I set them for midnight the day before. And I could come in the morning before class, assess how they did on the lecture and immediately I have a lot of information going into the classroom that day for where they’re stuck and I could modify my approach to the learning goals for that day based on how they did on their PlayPosit. And that just changed everything. That made it so much better, and I think from the students perspective, they felt more accountable because there were points that were associated to watching these lectures. And then I would come into class and the first thing I would do is sort of go through the questions and the things that they missed and talk to them about it. And it gave this really nice back and forth. And it sort of broke the ice a bit, because there’s always that little awkward start when you get into classroom, or at least there is for me, and this was an easy way for, say, “Okay, so on the lecture that you guys completed for yesterday, here are some topics that you didn’t really understand. So, let’s go through them together and maybe we can make sure that everyone’s on the same page.” And that sort of changed the game for me for the flipped classroom model.

John: Going back to the PlayPosit, you can also do the same thing with Camtasia and upload the videos as a SCORM package into Blackboard, Canvas, or other things as well.

Trish: Oh, I have to check that out.

John: Once the students arrived in class, you mentioned that you used a just-in-time teaching approach. How did you structure the class? What would your class generally consist of during the class time?

Trish: I originally taught on Monday, Wednesday, Friday for 50 minutes and realized that that was not a long enough time period for us to do what we wanted to do. So, I switched to a Tuesday-Thursday class so I could have a full hour and 20 minutes with my students twice a week. So, typically when students come to class, we have this sort of icebreaker where we go through the lecture material. And sometimes that might take 10 or 15 minutes if there’s a concept that the students really need to get for us to do our activity for the day. And then we usually go straight into a prompt for what the activity is going to be. So, for example, one of the classes that I teach… my favorite classes… junior-level class in volcanology… so, it’s just called volcanoes. And it’s a sneaky class because it’s actually a geophysics class. It’s very math and physics heavy, but I don’t tell the students that when they come, and they do not have an upper-level math requirement to take the course. And this was sort of my sneaky way to entrain students that might not realize that they can absolutely do this. So, I get a lot of diversity in that class: we’ll have communications majors, advertising, education majors, as well as the geology majors. The first time I taught the class, of the 20 students in the class only 4 were geology majors and the other 16 were just spread from throughout the campus. So, it was a really cool opportunity to empower students that “Wes, you can use math and physics and it’s not that intimidating”. So, we go straight into these activities and every exercise is quantitative. They get real geophysical data from deforming volcanoes and active volcanoes around the world, and they analyze it. And there’s a large social sciences component because I want them to think about the societal impacts of those volcanoes and potentials for eruption and how it might impact the communities that are around the volcanoes. And then also that communication thruway of how as we as scientists communicate hazards to local populations. So, they have a lot of different levels of work that they’re doing. Almost every class period is done in a jigsaw manner, where they’re broken into small groups and each small group is going to be working on some component that at the end of the class we’re going to come together and discuss. I typically start the prep of the activity, for example, “Okay, today we’re going to be looking at this type of volcano.” And maybe it’s a stratovolcano. And we’re going to look at Mount St. Helens in the US, we’re going to look at Mount Fuji in Japan, we’re going to look at Ruapehu in New Zealand. But, each group will have a different volcano. And they’re going to look at data directly from that volcano and the surrounding areas and do a small activity that helps them to understand that data set, the type of physical processing, and then at the end of class, each of the groups will come back together and present what they found to the group and then there’s some larger full-classroom group discussion questions that will go over as a class. So, it’s usually the activity I hope will take about 45 minutes, but it really depends. I try to keep them short in my mind, but then oftentimes they go a little bit long if the students get really excited about it. One of the things I think is really good about the flipped class is that I’m able to do so much more than I was able to do in sort of a classical passive learning model. And with that came a lot of grading. And so the first term I did flipped classes, I had not learned about light grading, and was buried in the amount of feedback I was trying to provide to students. So, if we had PlayPosits a couple times a week, we had these activities twice a week, they had additional outside of class things, they had midterms… so, it was unreal, the amount of grading. So, I was very fortunate to find out about light grading, and how to maybe back up the amount of feedback and time I’m spending on student papers and that really helped a lot. So, I think that one of the things that has to be said in conjunction with this particular model is: you need to do some sort of light grading, because there’s no way to stay on top of everything without losing sleep. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how you adjusted your grading in specific ways?

Trish: Originally, when I did the PlayPosits, again, there are a lot of essay questions. So, I would take a lot of time to really think through the answers to the essay questions and making sure that I’d have a rubric for what I wanted, what points I wanted them to hit on each of these essay questions, and I was very detailed about when they miss things and providing feedback. And so as I shifted into a light grading model, I would do that for the first couple of weeks. And then from then on out, it would just be a quick glance, like, did they hit this? And I wouldn’t spend as much time with the subtleties of “Yes, they wrote out a great answer, and they hit all these points.” And then for just the in-class exercises, the thing I started doing too was originally I had each student turn in their own exercise, even in the groups because I wanted to see their individual contribution. But, I recognize that there was enough individual assessment through the playp osits, and through their midterms, that having that additional individual assessment through the group activity really wasn’t necessary. And it wasn’t really contributing to their success in the class. By having individual assessment on the group assignments, it wasn’t helping students who were falling behind do better. And so after that point, I started allowing the groups to just do their presentations as a Google slideshow, and then I would have their Google slideshow. So, basically, in the jigsaw puzzle, they go into their group, they work on this presentation and when we come back together, each group shows a Google slide or Google doc of what they’ve been working on, and they present it to the entire class. At that point, I just say that’s good enough and I don’t require that each student then hands in the answers to the discussion questions in their own words. So, little things like that made it a lot more tangible for me. Whereas before when I was having each student providing responses for the discussion questions, and then on top of that having the discussion in the class, it was just too much. [LAUGHTER] But, I admit that it came from a perspective that I was concerned that some students would not fully contribute to the group activity, and I wanted to try to hold people accountable, but it really was a little bit too much micromanaging. And I think that the groups ended up holding each other accountable in their own ways without needing me to sit and say, “Okay, everyone needs to answer this question.” The other thing I really like about the small groups is that I’ve noticed that it brings out a lot of discussion from students that otherwise do not participate in the larger group discussions. And one of my favorite things in those small group activities is going around the room… and I typically spend a couple minutes with each group, and I just sort of keep roving around the classroom and it helps me to get to know individual students a lot better. And it also gives them so much more confidence to talk to me. And I feel like it’s made me more approachable as an instructor because they’ve had these smaller group interactions with me where I’ve sat at their table and said, “Oh, that’s a great idea…” or “Oh, have you thought about this” and those just little micro interactions really build up and it creates a student population where they feel more comfortable in the class. And then by the end of the term, I feel like, as a class, it’s much more energetic and engaged. And even in those larger groups discussion, some of the quieter students that you would never have heard from previously are starting to speak out and oftentimes with the encouragement of their group members. That’s another thing I really like about the small group setup.

John: Could you give us some feel for the size of your classes? How large are they typically?

Trish: My typical class size is 20. I usually keep the classes up to 40 students because that’s what the flexible classroom configurations will hold. One of the interesting things about the flipped class is that the first day of class, I do tell the students, these are my expectations. This is a flipped class you’ve signed up for and we go through what that model looks like and I always have students drop after that first day. That’s kind of fascinating for me, maybe it would be nice to follow up and find out…. Did you drop because of the model that was being used in the classroom? Or did you drop because of a schedule conflict? Or were there other things going on? But, I typically end up with 20 students that end up through the entire term. I teach mostly upper-level junior-, senior-level courses. So, I’ve not had the opportunity to try these techniques in the large introductory level classes.

John: I think most of them should scale pretty nicely, except for the grading aspect of it.

Trish: Yeah, I think that were to be done in an introductory class, you probably would want to have some TAs involved as well, just to help. I recognize that other instructors do these amazing small group activities in these large format lecture classes. But, I think having the logistical setup so that you can walk around and interact with groups, maybe not every group every time, but enough so that you can hit most of the groups once in a while, would be imperative because I really think that the students greatly benefit from that almost one-on-one interactivity with the professor.

John: I teach a class typically between three and 420 students in the fall, and I do wander around and I’ve found something similar. I don’t get to sit with each group. But, the students that I do interact with become dramatically more likely to stop by and ask questions, or if they see me in the hallway, to come up and just say hello. So, those individual interactions can make a big difference in practice.

Rebecca: I think it’s just a far more efficient way to give feedback as well. You can disrupt misconceptions and reframe things for small groups. And then if you stop by a couple of groups and hear the same kinds of misconceptions, you can address those more holistically to the whole group. I found that works really well for me, too.

Trish: Yeah, absolutely. And I always get tickled when I see that. I mean, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. But, when there are lots of groups that have the same misconception, because it means that there’s something that… or a piece of information that I have not given the students or something that’s missing in how we’ve set up the activity. And that’s always kind of nice to see and it helps me to redevelop how I’m going to teach it the next time. So, I really do like that. Because otherwise, if I were just lecturing, I would never realize that there was this piece of information that nobody got until the exam comes back and at that point it’s sometimes too late.

John: That’s one of the advantages of a just-in-time teaching approach. It allows you to focus your class time on the things that students are struggling with, and to skip over the things that they already understand. So, it lets you use your class time much more efficiently.

Rebecca: At the end of one of those class periods or even during that class period, I jot down what those things are, so that if it’s a while between each semester when you teach it again you don’t forget what those are because sometimes you can lose track. So, coming up with a system to routinely to check in on those things can be really helpful.

Trish: Yeah, a journaling effort or something. Yeah.

John: And I saw you also do something called Trashcano?

Trish: [LAUGHTER] Yes, Trashcano, Trashcano is an activity that we do late in the term once the weather gets nice. In the class we talked about different styles of eruptions. And one of the styles that we get to later in the class is explosive eruptions andTrashcano is a demonstration that was developed by my colleagues at Colgate: Karen Harpp, Danny Geist, and Alison Koleszar. And they basically developed this experiment where you take a trash can and you fill it up about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way filled with water. And if you submerge a two-liter bottle with liquid nitrogen in it, that bottle represents a pressurized magma chamber and it ends up rupturing because liquid nitrogen is boiling at ambient temperature. And so the two-liter bottle ruptures in that water and creates a column that sprays into the air. So, for this activity, the students do some calculations of plume heights so they can use their iPhones to measure the angle of the trajectory of the water and they can say, “Okay, the plume went this high” and they can do some back calculations to discuss what sort of pressurization caused that amount of uplift to the water. And then we also put styrofoam balls of different sizes and shapes into the trash can. And they can make isopach maps… basically how we actually map explosive eruptions where we take the different grain sizes, and we create a map of how far the different grain sizes spread from the center of the eruption. It’s a fun day outside. This past year, we did it in the rain, which was rather interesting to see how rainfall dampens the amount of distance the styrofoam can spread. I’m not sure that we’d want to do that in the rain again, but it was an interesting experiment. Yeah, we do a lot of little things like that so that the students can take their concepts, the actual equations that we’re working on in class and apply them in a tactile, physical way.

Rebecca: Trish, do you use consistent teams throughout the semester or do you rotate how your groups are formed?

Trish: I’ve done it a couple different ways. I’ve now had the opportunity to teach my flipped classes two to three times each at this point. And some terms I do let them switch around and some terms I keep it consistent. And I’ve found that overall, it works a little better when they’re consistent teams the whole way. I feel like the students build a lot of teamwork and camaraderie with their groups. But, I don’t know… I try to take it by a term-by-term basis because I have had situations where the students are eager to switch around and meet other members of the classroom. We do this a little bit with our jigsaw discussions. So, for example, we do a role playing exercise where each group is a volcano monitoring agency. So, in your monitoring agency, you have a volcanologist, you have a seismologist, you have a geodesist you have a communication specialist, but then all the communication specialists from each group will have to get together and work as a team for one of the activities and all the geodesists will have to get together and work as a team for the activities and then bring them back to their initial group. So, they do get some chances to interact with one another through these, I don’t know, is it a jigsaw puzzle within a jigsaw puzzle? [LAUGHTER] I’m not sure how you describe it, but they do get these opportunities to move around to other groups. But, that’s something that I still am thinking a lot about. I think you had a guest on recently. Dakin Burdick. In his he talked about how sometimes he likes to let the students all which groups all the time because then they get to know everybody in the class, and then sometimes it keeps them all together. It seems like a lot of people do different things with this. I don’t have a great method yet. But, I do tend to go on a sort of term-by-term basis and get a feel for the culture of the class and how people are melding. I do find sometimes when you do the consistent groups, it can happen that the group tends to congeal really well. And then it lifts up all of the students in the group. And so people attend class more regularly, and they’re much more engaged. But, I have seen it happen where groups have sort of fallen apart because one or two members just aren’t attending regularly, and they’re really not committed or engaged. And that becomes difficult. And then you really kind of need to reshuffle a little bit.

John: We talked about that in episode in early October with Kristin Croyle when she was talking about team-based learning where there are persistent teams. And one of the things she suggested is it’s really important to form teams that are constructed to be balanced so that you don’t run into that. But, there are some advantages of having persistent teams. But, if it’s a persistent, dysfunctional team with people missing, then that could be problematic. I think a lot depends on the nature of the activities. If you’re going to have persistent activities like in team-based learning, having well defined teams may be useful, but for other types of activities that vary class to class it may not matter as much.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think there are certainly advantages to both. I’ve had experiences where we’re doing long-term projects. So, doing some preliminary shorter activities with those groups that they’re going to have for their long-term projects can be really helpful. And getting those teams gelled before it really matters. And I’ve also had experience doing persistent teams when I’ve gamified a classroom. And that actually works really well in getting people to hold each other accountable and be competitive. So, I’ve had really good luck when I’ve done that as well. You’ve also received a lot of grants for your research.

Trish: Yeah, I’m in a fortunate position that my primary position is research. So, I don’t actually teach that much. I only teach two classes a year. So, I do try to find ways to integrate all of the exciting research that my group is doing into what we do in the classroom setting, but not just my classes, the other classes in the department too. We teach a 100-level course in oceanography and a lot of my research centers around seagoing expeditions and collecting geophysical data at sea to understand submarine volcanoes. So, we try to bring that experience back into the classroom for our introductory level students. Especially in a landlocked state of Illinois, many of our students have never seen the ocean. They’ve never been to the beach, and they don’t really have a concept for why would scientists be at sea collecting data? And what are scientists doing in our marine setting? So, bringing that into our introductory classes, I think, is really critical. So, the big push there was… I was chief scientist of an expedition we’ve just wrapped up. We had two seagoing missions to the eastern Pacific, it was called the Oasis expedition. And we’re investigating a line of seamounts on the sea floor. So, these are volcanoes that have been active over the past million years, and we were using this submarine to collect data, to collect rock samples from the sea floor, and it started because I have a young daughter and I was going to be gone for about 45 days, and I wanted her to feel connected to me while I was away. We don’t really have great internet at sea, as you can imagine. So, it’s hard to continue to feel connected with loved ones at home. So, I decided with the help of my husband, to create a YouTube channel that would chronicle our life at sea and link back to my daughter’s classroom and some local schools that they could watch what scientists are doing. And then we also ended up using those videos in the introductory courses on campus at a higher level so that students could see a sort of a hands on of what we do when we’re at sea. But, yeah, it started out predominantly as me wanting to stay connected to my then six year old while I was sailing, and became a really great way to provide outreach to a broader learning ecosystem. So, lots of people throughout the community,

Rebecca: I think it might seem more obvious that students in a landlocked state don’t have experience with marine life. But, at the same time, I think that our students don’t have much experience with many professional experiences in what it’s like to be in any kind of industry or research setting. So, I think that that same methodology works in a lot of circumstances to give students exposure to what it might actually be like to be a professional in the field.

Trish: Yeah, and I really like that sort of informal blogging aspect. So, these videos were [LAUGHTER] very informal. I had a blogging camera and I basically just filmed myself doing things. And I remember at one point, my husband sent me this email that basically said, “Wow, you look really tired. Are you doing okay?” Because I just was like, “Alright, it’s 4:30 in the morning, we’re getting ready to do some scientific stuff. I’ll put my camera on me and film what we’re doing.” But, yeah, it’s an exhausting process because it’s a 24/7 operation when you’re out at sea collecting data. You have this facility. For 30, 40 days, whatever it is, and you want to use every second of it to get as much information as possible. But, I think that’s important because a lot of people don’t know like, “Oh, that’s what an ocean scientist….” well, what my particular volcanology centered ocean scientist “…does for research.” And then the other arm of my research program is very much in volcano hazard. So, that feeds directly into the volcano geophysics courses I teach because my group works on developing forecasting mechanisms and algorithms for taking volcano monitoring data and providing monitoring agencies with information about how volcanoes are evolving and we have a lot of monitoring agency partners that we’re working with to try to provide some new quantitative methods for assessing volcanic unrest. So, these are things that we’re thinking about every day, but we certainly can infuse them into classes on volcanology and volcano geophysics,

John: Having that video channel would also let you do some time shifting… where much of the work that you’re doing takes place during breaks when classes wouldn’t be in session. And it still allows you to bring this into your own classes as well. I’ve watched several of your videos, and they’re really good. We’ll share a link to those in the show notes.

Trish: Oh, great… Thanks…. [LAUGHTER] They haven’t been updated for years. But, yeah, I think the asynchronous aspect is really cool. One of the things that we struggled with when we were first doing these expeditions was we were trying to schedule, within reason, because it’s really hard to schedule your ship time because you’re working with all the other scientists that are utilizing the facility, but we’re trying to schedule them such that students could participate synchronously with what we were doing. So, while we’re out at sea we’re sending back Q&As and doing videos. But, what we found was that you could still use all of this information after the fact so students have been benefiting from these videos for the last three, four years, which is really fantastic. And I think that it’s something that a lot of fields scientists could take advantage of. For example, the Antarctic field season is when everyone’s off for holiday. But, perhaps if they’re doing these videos, that they could bring them back and create learning modules for students to see more of what is it like to be a scientist working in Antarctica during the Antarctic summer… and not in a documentary way, I felt like one of the things I really wanted to do was provide that informal feeling for students so that they could look at that and say, “Wow, I actually feel like I could do that. And I could see myself in that role.” Whereas when you have that documentary, shininess, it’s harder to imagine that it’s not this esoteric thing that you could never aspire to be as I wanted to show like, “Yes, we’re up at 4:30 in the morning and we’re tired.” Yeah. I like that.

Rebecca: I think you’re right, that that polish sometimes makes it seem really not approachable to students, or that they don’t belong in the field, or they don’t belong in the discipline. But, if you’re showing that realness in that authentic moment through your own lens, it’s really beneficial to students… and I can imagine this working in just about any context, actually, to help students understand the day in the life that they might be pursuing.

Trish: Yeah, absolutely. It would be so helpful too for K through 12 students, because a lot of times they have no idea. Geology is an interesting discipline in that we’re kind of a found discipline. Students usually come to college thinking, “Oh, I’m going to go do chemistry or I’m going to do physics or engineering…” and geology is not really on students radar, but then they start to see how they can apply chemistry, physics, engineering, and math, all in one discipline, and they sort of gravitate towards us. But, we don’t get a lot of freshmen into our major but maybe if K through 12 students saw what geologists do on a daily basis and what a career looks like, they might say, “Oh, yeah, that’s a major I could be interested in.”

Rebecca: There’s a lot of disciplines and careers that students have no idea exists. The lens in which they see the world is largely through whatever classes they’ve been taking. So, it’s like, world is math, English, science, these really broad categories of things.

John: And they see it from the textbook perspective, as a well defined body of knowledge that they just have to learn or memorize, and not as an active, ongoing endeavor. And those videos you created, and these types of connections that you’re making for students help open up that possibility to them. As part of the OASIS project, you used a variety of social media including Twitter, Reddit, and I believe you did a Reddit Ask Me Anything. Could you tell us a little bit about your use of social media for this project?

Trish: One thing that we learned very quickly is that the internet on the ship was not great. So, the day we did the Reddit Ask Me Anything, it was a day that the Alvin submarine was on the sea floor collecting samples so we knew the ship could stay in one spot. So, it’s sort of like having an aerial antenna on your old TV and you’re trying to like bend it in just the right way so you have a good connection. So, we were able to set the ship in one location and then rotate it [LAUGHTER] so that the satellite was in the right spot so we could get on Reddit, and then we had to like shut down everything using the internet and we all crowded around one computer [LAUGHTER] and did the Ask Me Anything. And I think it was a really good experience. One of the things that cracks me up is that there was a scientist on a sister ship in the northern Pacific that responded to one of our questions and said, “Hey, we’re up here on the RV Armstrong. Hello.” [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I think that they’re Reddit Ask Me Anything was a great experience. It was mostly done by the graduate students on the ship. I was sort of running around doing other things. But, it was a great way, again, to provide outreach. It gives you a demographic that otherwise you may not have interacted with, which I think is important.

Rebecca: Sounds like another sneaky method, like not telling students that your volcano class has math in it. [LAUGHTER]

Trish: Yes. Exactly…[LAUGHTER] Exactly.

John: We always end the podcast by asking, what are you doing next?

Trish: One of the things that we’re working on right now, as I mentioned, we’ve collected a lot of video at sea and on the last expedition, we collected a lot of virtual reality 3D video with GoPro fusion. So, we use GoPro fusions to collect really nice 3D videos on the ship. So, things like how the scientists were cleaning tube worms that were collected from hydrothermal vents and how they’re processing rocks and just the day-to-day life on the ship. So, we collected all this virtual reality video and now we’re working with colleagues and the CITL, the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning on campus to develop VR modules for introductory classes. And this is been a really crazy learning experience for me because one of our goals is to give these experiences to students that would not necessarily ever have a chance to go to sea or to do this type of work. But, building and structuring the learning goals for these VR experiences is really difficult and I didn’t realize how big of a leap it would be from just the video content and lectures to creating a VR structured activity for students. And there’s some really cool things they’re doing here on campus. The medical school’s been doing a lot with VR techniques for med students and different procedures in VR. And there’s an Archaeology Professor on campus who’s been using it to like simulate an archaeological dig using VR. So, we’re working with some really amazing educators. And hopefully, that will come out with some fascinating modules for our students and upcoming offerings of our oceanography class. But, that’s sort of the big thing that we’re doing right now. I’m kind of excited to see how that will turn out.

John: We talked a little bit by email about you and your husband coming back on later to talk about some of that work. So, for our listeners, we will be revisiting this sometime in the next couple months, I think.

Trish: Yeah, hopefully we have a paper in review right now, where we look at asynchronous linkages to field expeditions and ways that you can collect videos and content while you’re in the field, sort of non-disciplinary-specific, of course we’re looking at marine sciences. But, again, you could use it in other fields and how you can bring that back to produce learning modules for your classrooms.

Rebecca: …sounds really exciting.

John: We’re looking forward to hearing more about that as well.

Trish: Thanks.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been really interesting.

Trish: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you guys. And I really appreciated your podcast, it’s been so inspirational to me and my work. I really appreciate it. ‘

John: It’s been a lot of fun for us too. We get to talk to people in depth. Normally, when we gave workshops, we’d hear little bits and snippets of what people on campus were doing, but being able to explore things like this is so much more valuable for us.

Rebecca: And we get to learn about all kinds of different disciplines too which is really exciting. to

Trish: I think what’s so cool is exactly what you said in your hundredth podcast that a lot of times faculty can’t go to those workshops. So, giving them a way to listen to the podcast while they’re commuting or traveling is just awesome. It’s very, very cool. Before going to sea, I always load up my phone and computer with all the podcasts I can get my hands on, because once you’re there, you’re there. That’s pretty much it. [LAUGHTER] Just download the entire catalog.

[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.

102. Team-Based Learning

Posted in active learning, classroom community, classroom management, collaboration, collaborative learning, evidence-based practices, higher education, learning, lecturing, pedagogy, peer instruction, project based learning, team based learning
October 9, 2019

A large body of research finds that active learning approaches result in larger learning gains than traditional lecture approaches. In this episode, Dr. Kristin Croyle joins us to discuss how she transitioned from  explore using interactive lecture to collaborative learning, and then to team-based learning. Kristin is a Psychologist and our new Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

  • Johnson, R. T., & Johnson, D. W. (2008). Active learning: Cooperation in the classroom. The annual report of educational psychology in Japan, 47, 29-30.
  • A discussion by Dan Ariely explaining why asking for shorter lists of positive features in a relationship can engender positive feelings appears in this March 24, 2014 video clip.
  • Michaelsen, L. K., Knight, A. B., & Fink, L. D. (2004). Team-based learning: A transformative use of small groups in college teaching.
  • Team-Based Learning Cooperative
  • Epstein Educational Enterprises, What is the IF-AT?
  • Sweet, M., & Michaelsen, L. K. (2012). Team-based learning in the social sciences and humanities: Group work that works to generate critical thinking and engagement. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Croyle, K. L., & Alfaro, E. (2012). Applying team-based learning with Mexican American students in the social science classroom. Team-based learning in the social sciences and humanities: Group work that works to generate critical thinking and engagement, 203-220.
  • Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251-19257.
  • 74. Uncoverage – David Voelker – Tea for Teaching podcast episode discussing the uncoverage movement in history, March 27, 2019

Transcript

John: A large body of research finds that active learning approaches result in larger learning gains than traditional lecture approaches. In this episode, we explore one faculty member’s transition from using interactive lecture to collaborative learning, and then to team-based learning.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Today our guest is Dr. Kristin Croyle. Kristin is a Psychologist and our new Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Kristin.

Kristin: Thank you.

John: Our teas today are:

Kristin: Earl Grey

Rebecca: I am having Mama’s work tea, because Ada made it this morning and she calls it work tea, which means she pulls the tea bag tag out and puts it in the big cup. Also, it’s just my normal English Afternoon. But, that was a better story.

John: And I’m drinking Spring Cherry green tea.

Rebecca: We invited you here today to talk about collaborative and team-based learning in your classes. But before you do that, you’ve noted that you had a strong preparation in teaching before you got started. Can you talk a little bit about that. We’ve talked a little bit about that on the show before and how a lot of faculty aren’t prepared…

Kristin: Um hmm.

Rebecca: So, could you talk about how your preparation may be informed what you’ve done.

Kristin: My graduate program, I went to the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the University of Montana in beautiful Missoula. And that program takes the preparation of their grad students very seriously, but across several areas not just in clinical work and research, but also knowing that some of them are going to end up in positions in which there will be teaching. So, while I was there, that very first semester I was brought in, they had a structure for teaching their introductory psychology classes where graduate students were assigned our own classes where we were the instructor in the classroom, but we had a supportive network around us. So, the syllabus was already there, the textbook was already there. We collaborated in writing tests. We had a structure of TAs that supported us and they would have recitation sections in which the TAs also received development. And we joined in that so we could see how more hands-on kind of things could be done with students in smaller groups. We even assigned our final grades together. And some of those pieces are pieces that are areas of skill that people don’t often think about developing. So, that first semester, all I had to do was think about working within the structure: How am I going to handle the day-to-day teaching and learning in the classroom? I didn’t have to worry about course design because the course was already designed in front of me. And I also didn’t have to, at the end, think: “When you assign grades, is that rigid? Do you really have to follow the exact, you know, 90/80 that it is in the syllabus? Or what if there are natural breaks around 88 or 89? Is it okay to flex that? What kind of power does an instructor have that is fair to students and evaluation?” I got to do all of that in a collaborative setting with a very experienced faculty member as a guide. There was also a credit-bearing course for teaching psychology that we were encouraged to take… which I really enjoyed. And then I was given opportunities to function more independently. When they needed a stats teacher over the summer, and they knew I was living there over the summer, I got to teach on an adjunct basis, but still with the support of faculty around me. So kind of putting students in the deep end, but with a high level of support around them, I felt very prepared when I was done with the graduate program to enter into an assistant professor position. And I still appreciate the preparation that they gave me.

Rebecca: I think with the preparation like that you’re probably far more willing to experiment and do new things as a faculty member too and to maybe even break away from what faculty around you are doing. Do you find that to be the case? Or were there other faculty doing some of this collaborative work in the department that you were in?

Kristin: Yes, and no. One of the experiences I had at my previous institution, which was the University of Texas – Pan American that then transitioned through a merger to be the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. I was talking with a colleague in another department about the kinds of things we were doing in the classroom. And I still remember him saying “Oh, I didn’t know you could do that in the classroom and that was like teaching.” He had a very restricted idea of what teaching was, and what would be acceptable to colleagues, which he had never had the opportunity to test with other people around him. And that was something that I arrived from day one… that you talked about your teaching… that you can do many different things in the classroom. And it’s all teaching, as long as you are trying to work with students to create a learning environment and they are learning, then it counts as teaching. So I did come in with a much more flexible idea, then certainly some of my colleagues who hadn’t had an opportunity to ever have those discussions. And of course, some people are hired into departments in which those discussions don’t ever happen, so they may persist with those misconceptions for many years.

John: Or throughout their entire careers at times. [LAUGHTER] The scaffolding that was provided is really nice, because we’ve talked to a few people who’ve been in teaching training program or had some training in graduate programs. But usually, it’s not quite as structured as that and that’s a nice feature.

Rebecca: Yeah, I came from a program like that, but it was like very front loaded. It wasn’t that ongoing…. So I felt a lot more prepared, because I did have a lot of those experiences, but I didn’t have that same kind of supportive network throughout. Which is incredibly valuable.

Rebecca: So, you want to take us through what some of your collaborative experiences have been in the classroom and the ways that you set up some of the team-based learning exercises, maybe starting with what are those?

Kristin: Sure. So kind of the way that I journey through my teaching, particularly when I was an assistant professor, I felt comfortable in the classroom, but I didn’t feel expert. I felt like I was still trying to figure out what was going on, which is a perfectly fine way to be and a good state for learning to occur. So I felt like I was a talented lecturer, like I can engage students. I teach in psychology, I also think psychology is naturally very engaging, but part of that is because I really love the field. So, I felt like I could engage students and that they would listen and that they would be interested. But I started to become dissatisfied that there was always a core of engaged students and I had no idea what was happening with the other students in the class. And then sometimes I would be disappointed when we have tests or homework. Everyone said they had no questions. Clearly that was wrong. I was wondering how do you engage the majority or all of the students in their learning so that they aren’t coasting through class believing that they understand until they really don’t. And then I also felt like I was kind of fooling myself into thinking that students were with me when they were not with me. So I had an opportunity at that time to do some intensive cooperative learning training along the model of Johnson and Johnson collaborative learning. And that model from the University of Minnesota, it focuses on the importance of cooperation in the classroom, and that in cooperative settings, students learn more, develop a stronger sense of self efficacy around their learning; that they together are able to achieve more than they would individually. And it also has impacts on retention… that if students are feeling like they are individually known and valued in the classroom by their peers, they’re more likely to continue showing up to class and to develop relationships outside of the classroom that supports them along the way. So through that training, it was intensive, it was like eight hours a week, one day set for several weeks. The very first day, I could see what a difference I was going to make in my classroom. So, for example, I was using group assignments in class and they had all the same disadvantages that group assignments and most classes have, because I had no idea how to structure the group work so that it would be successful. I was doing group work to save me grading time, honestly.

Rebecca: That’s why a lot of people go to group work.

Kristin: Yes! Without understanding that all I had to do was some structural changes, and then it would actually be effective for learning as well, instead of just saving me grading time. In that cooperative learning training, I learned how to structure intensive group work that could be the length of an entire semester, or it could be the length of a single class day. I learned how to structure less intensive moments of team time. So how do you do a think-pair-share that works versus how do you do a think-pair-share that doesn’t work very well. So, that within the course of that training… actually just within a few days… I suddenly had, instead of 10% of the students in the class engaged on a daily basis, I had 100% of the students engaged on a daily basis. So, that was a huge breakthrough and I continued that way for several years.

John: What were some of the structural changes that you made that did lead to increased engagement?

Kristin: So, the cooperative learning approach of Johnson and Johnson, is kind of theoretically heavy, in the sense that they outline the pieces that are necessary for strong collaboration to occur. And then they turn it over to you as the instructor to say, “How do I build those pieces in?” So, for example, they emphasize positive interdependence as one of the essential components of cooperative learning… that when you create a group and a group activity for them to do, the activity has to be structured in such a way that each person is necessary to contribute. You can’t structure it in such a way that you can have three people talking when one person is only needed, and there are specific recommendations on how do you structure it so that everyone is needed. At the same time you have to build an individual accountability as another required component, so that, even if each person is needed, people can still slack off, say, “Yes, you all can’t do as well without me because you need me, but I don’t really care about what is happening here.” There has to be a level of individual accountability that’s also built in. Along with that, some of the skills that I thought were most important, they build an emphasis on group processing and social skills, so that if you have people consistently working together in class, they may not have developed the social skills to do that effectively, especially over time. You can work with someone for two minutes on a think-pair-share and really be bad at social skills. But, if you have to work with them over an extended period of time on a project and things are going south in terms of group conflict, it’s the instructor’s responsibility to help them to develop the social skills to work together. For example, on the first day of class, when I first start having students talk to each other so that they know that’s going to be a pattern in the class, I give them something quick to talk about. And I say introduce yourself to the person next to you… spend two minutes talking about this. And then I’m going to ask you about what you talked about. And then I run around the class real quick… pair up people who aren’t participating, introduce them to each other so that they understand this is a part of the class. So, then I follow back. So, what pieces are important there? …that I explicitly instruct them, you turn with your body… you actually make eye contact. And I will point out as people first start doing this, look at these two people, they are looking at each other, because many times students won’t do that, and it’s very hard to have a cooperative interaction if you don’t make eye contact… and I will say, “Who was the person you talked to? Tell me their name.” So they understand that I was serious when I said, introduce yourself, tell me something about them and that there’s individual accountability through just random calling on… that they need to participate in the cooperative portion. And then there’s also the self-reinforcing aspect of it that five minutes later, when I say to talk about something else, they realize they already know somebody in class, they have a connection. The next day, when I come in, they’re not quiet, they’re already talking to each other, they’ve created those connections.

John: A nice thing about that, too, is for people who are uncomfortable talking about themselves in class, having one person tell you something about the other person, it’s a little bit less pressure, it’s a little less revelation to the whole group. There’s some evidence that that type of thing is more effective in providing a more comfortable environment.

Rebecca: Kristin, can you also talk a little bit about a specific example of a cooperative activity where all of the members are held accountable, and all have a role? …just to provide an example for people who have less experience.

Kristin: So cooperative learning can be divided into informal and formal cooperative learning. Informal cooperative learning tends to be much shorter activities that can be done kind of on the fly if you already have an idea in your mind of how you might want to do that. Formal cooperative learning tends to be more intensively structured… longer-term activities. So that could be a single class session. If you’re going to do an activity that takes an hour, that would be more formal… or if you’re going to do something that takes an entire semester. The pair-and-share that I just talked about is an example of informal cooperative learning. Something like a jigsaw classroom activity can be structured as a formal cooperative learning activity. And it already shares almost all of the components: there’s individual accountability, because each student is given a specific role. There’s also positive interdependence, because the success of everyone depends on each person doing their role. So there are ones that are already structured with a built in component. The pieces that aren’t built into something like a jigsaw classroom activity, would be the group skills and group processing, and the ways that you can build that in. You can, for example, ask groups to reflect on what went well. I typically emphasize that more than asking them to reflect on things that went poorly, because asking to reflect on what went well tends to maintain a positive atmosphere, but also helps them to cover both bases at the same time anyway.

Rebecca: …or realize that my list for what went well is not very long… [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Right. So, a common group processing thing I would have students do after their first more lengthy or more formal cooperative learning activity would be: list three things that your team did well together and one thing that you could improve on. And another thing I might ask them to do is to provide positive feedback to each member of the group at the end of the activity. And the kind of feedback that they provide is usually pretty specific, and helps to shape their behavior throughout the rest of the semester. So when they say things like, “I like it when you disagreed, and you said that this other thing would be a better way to go” that provides important feedback, and it helps to encourage better processing going forward. But I will go around and give individual social skill feedback too. But it’s usually things like, “Oh, I see you’re sitting so far away from your group, I’m not sure they can hear you, let’s scoot your chair in so that they can hear you.” Or I might ask, “Oh, do you know this person’s name next to you? What’s her name?” …and we’ll make sure that people maintain the social and cooperative connections that enable to do that kind of good group.

John: Just as an aside, it’s useful if you’re asking about things that went well, to keep the list fairly short. I’m reminded of a study that Dan Ariely talked about where they did a controlled experiment where in one case, they asked people to reflect on three things they liked about their partner and another case to list 10 things I liked about the partner, and then they surveyed them on the quality of the relationship. And those who were asked about three things generally rated their relationship with a partner fairly high. But when they were asked to come up with 10 things, they struggled with that and they rated that relationship lower. So keeping the list short…

Kristin: Right.

John: …is really good so you don’t…

Kristin: There’s kind of analogous thought about keeping things like gratitude lists. If you list too much stuff, it can have a negative effect, because you start to identify things that you really don’t think are that important, and it makes you think the whole thing is less important.

John: And if you want to get the opposite effect, ask people to list 10 things that were bad, and then they’ll struggle beyond the first few. You talked about having continuous relationships or persistent relationships with collaborative learning. Did you try to keep the group relationships consistent for the same groups throughout the term? Or did you vary that?

Kristin: I varied it. There are some good data to suggest that in collaborative learning… they refer to them as base teams… that base teams have a persistent positive effect, particularly on things like student engagement and retention throughout the semester and throughout the year…. that you have a team that is expecting you every day. But when I was doing cooperative learning, I didn’t restructure my courses. I restructured the day. Does that make sense?

Rebecca: Um hmm.

Kristin: So I didn’t have a reason for base groups. And I felt strange imposing them on the students without a reason. Besides, they would maybe be socially a good idea. I had to completely rebuild my courses from the ground up before I started using base teams. And that’s when I transitioned to team-based learning.

John: …and in team-based learning, persistent teams are recommended as part of the process.

Kristin: Absolutely.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about this transition to team-based learning. What prompted you to introduce that? …and how it worked?

Kristin: So I was happy with how courses were going. People were interested and engaged. I had students telling me, “I know every single person in this classroom.” and when you’re teaching a class of 30, or 40, or 50, that’s unusual. “I know everyone in here, I feel really supported.” I feel like things were going well. But I was unsatisfied with what I was teaching. I wasn’t clear, in my own mind, about what persistent learning outcomes I wanted for my students. I had not sat down and really thought through if I were to follow up with a student in a year or five years, what would I want them to recall from this class? What would I want them to be putting into use in their lives or in their careers? I had never thought that through. And I was fortunate enough to run into team-based learning at that time, right as I was primed to start thinking about this questions. Team-based learning originated by Larry Michaelsen. He was coming from the perspective of enrollment increases. He had been assigning some pretty challenging work. He was a faculty member in business. And as his course enrollments increased, he started to wonder how can you maintain the same kind of interesting, really challenging in class… by case work, for example… with a large enrollment. So he developed team-based learning to address that piece, but it also requires you to completely rethink the design of the course. And to start from the course outcomes: “What do you want the persistent outcomes to be?” …and then structure the course forward in that way. So in team-based learning, after you make a decision about your course outcomes, and what you really want students to be able to do, then you structure the course in a modular fashion. And each module has certain steps. So the beginning is student preparation, then when they come into class, you test. You say, “okay” …and it’s called the readiness assurance process. So you want to know what students are ready to do after they’ve individually prepared, and what they’re not ready to do. So they prepare, they test. And then, since it’s a team focus, they also test as a team. After that you have a good idea as an instructor, what are they ready to do? What are still the fuzzy areas? What do they really not get at all? What are their competencies as a team already, even if every individual student doesn’t have it, and then you can do some corrective lecturing, basically, so many lectures that fill in some of the gaps. And that’s all part of the readiness process, because you’re getting them ready to do some interesting application work in class. And the rationale for that is… and actually what I had been doing prior to that, was giving interesting application material to work on at home individually, while doing lecture and cooperative learning in class. But the interesting application material was actually the heart of the course, and the much more challenging piece. So it was better to bring the hard piece where they needed support into the classroom. And the piece they were ready to do, which was to do their own self study back into their own lives. So you do this readiness assurance process to make sure they are ready for interesting application, and then the majority at the time for the module you spent on application. Doing that after I had already worked with cooperative learning was really helpful, because all of that application work is done in a team setting. So when you already have some experience with how to build teams, how to maintain and develop their social skills, that’s really, really, really helpful. That’s a short version.

John: One of my colleagues, Bill Goffe, who was on one of our very early podcasts, noted that when he gave the group test, the performance always went up significantly, so that they could see the benefits of the peer discussion that was part of that. And he was really impressed with it. And he noted that, oftentimes, if a student didn’t show up for class one day, they get a hard time from their classmates from the group because they let the group down. And he said his attendance had never been better than when he was using a team-based learning approach.

Kristin: Absolutely. And a lot of people who do team-based learning, use the same methodology for doing the team testing, which is honestly really cute. It’s a scratch-off form. And the scratch-off form is used so that the team gets immediate feedback on each option. So on any particular item in a multiple choice test, if they want to select “B” they scratch off “B.” If it’s not there, then they continue to scratch until they get the right answer. For one thing, they love it. But also they are getting immediate team feedback. If this person is not speaking up, if they say I think it’s “B” and then they stop advocating and then it turns out to be “B” later than the team immediately knows, by the time they get to the next question. “Okay, we need to incorporate more feedback from all of our team members, wait a minute, this person who’s not speaking up actually has a lot to say.” In the course of just a few multiple choice questions, it brings their team development forward leaps and bounds. And they kind of have fun with a scratch off, which is also a bonus.

John: And it also gives them incentives to come prepared and to listen to other people in ways that they might not otherwise.

Kristin: Yeah, and their team will give them grief, if they say “Oh, I don’t know, because I didn’t read,” their team members will be like, “But we are depending on you, you need to read, we all read.”

John: And it also gives them a little bit, perhaps, of improvement in metacognition because they’re getting that immediate feedback, and it’s being coupled with the reactions of the peers. So if someone was insistent on a wrong answer, and they dominated that discussion, they might be a little more careful in the future and more willing to listen to the other people and reflect.

Kristin: Exactly, and it doesn’t have to wait till next week, it can happen right away. Right on the next question. The team application activities are also structured in a particular way. In team-based learning, they talk about the four S’s for the application activity, the first one is that you have to select a significant problem. So what they’re working on is something that will be important to them, something that they will identify with, or that they recognize is worth their time in thinking about and trying to think through. The second one is that they need to be working on this same problem. You can’t say teams one and two are working on this, three and four are working on this, five and six are working on this. Third one is that they structure in so that they make a specific choice as the outcome. Because it’s easier to solicit team feedback if everyone is making a specific choice rather than having kind of an open-ended narrative response. And it helps to stimulate whole group discussion as you’re moving. Now it can sound like it’s limiting to say that you have to make a specific choice, but you can do in a very broad way. And the fourth one is simultaneous reporting. So all the teams are asked to report at the same time on what the choice was that they made, so that they can’t piggyback off another team who’s putting in effort. So, as an example, one of the courses that I taught in the psychology major in Texas was the tests and measurements course in psychology, and test and measurements starts with a stats review. They’ve all had statistics, it usually comes prior to tests and measurement. But it’s the first time that they have an opportunity to work with statistics in kind of a decision-making way. So you start with a stats review. So one of the activities that I would do, I gave them two hypothetical first-grade teachers with how many questions 10 of there students got right on a spelling test. And the two distributions had the same mean, but one was fairly normal, and one was highly skewed. So they had to do their quick statistics review… Do the mean, median, mode and standard deviation describe the shape of the distribution. But the question I was asking them was, “If you were the principal, which teacher would you offer an after-school tutoring program to for extra pay? And which teacher would you potentially nominate for a teaching award?” They found that question to be a really interesting question. For one thing, students think a lot about what good teaching is, and what constitutes a good teacher. So they already come in with very strong opinions. And they also understand the complexity of, you know, if everybody’s passing but people aren’t excelling, is that good teaching? Whereas if most people are failing, but a few people are getting an “A” is that good teaching? …and how the data contributes to good decision making, but can also be kind of manipulated to contribute to decision making in not such a good way. So instead of just saying, “Let’s review the stats, here they are,” it was a question with a specific choice that they simultaneously reported on. And then we could discuss together. And of course, their answers are different. There’s different rationales in both ways. So then we could discuss together what their rationale was, if they want to debate they can debate a little. It generates a lot of student enthusiasm, and everybody’s doing it instead of just 10% of the class.

John: And once they’ve committed to an answer, they have a stake in and they really want to know, that’s something we’ve seen a lot of things we’ve talked about in the past, too.

Kristin: Absolutely.

Rebecca: When you were doing the team-based learning, were you sticking specifically to problems that were on a class-by-class basis still, like you were discussing in the co-operative setting, or were you doing some longer term activities that went across multiple class periods?

Kristin: I had the… what I consider gift… to often be teaching in a three-hour time slot, which is my very favorite time slot. So I would have activities that would extend two or three hours, but typically not between classes, I found that to be more of a sweet spot, at least for me. At my previous institution we had a very high commuter population. And I promised, in both models, that I would never ask them to do something out of class with their teams, that was one of my rules… that it was just simply too burdensome for students who have multiple outside of school commitments… family and work, or living potentially 150 miles apart, which was not unheard of. I promised them no out of class stuff. I structured that intentionally so that the individual preparation that they were doing, they could do anywhere on their own time schedule, but they were expected to be there. And their team expected them to be there to be able to engage in class. And it was also one of the ways that you talk people into it, when they say “I worked with other groups who were all slackers and we would always set times and they wouldn’t show up.” And I said “That’s not going to happen in here. We already have a time we’re all going to show up together.”

John: And the philosophy that’s very similar to the flipped classroom approach where you let students do the easy stuff outside and then give them assistance with or have them work in a framework where they’re getting more assistance with the more challenging issues.

Kristin: Absolutely. I think TBL [team-based learning] is definitely a flipped classroom approach.

Rebecca: I think the other thing that helps too with that model… of making sure you’re not working outside of class… really helps students with really different backgrounds start working together, because you might have students who are more traditional who are on campus. And so for them to meet outside of class is often not such a big deal. But then if you have students who are working or have families, and there’s a disconnect in the class, even, between those two populations, that helps make that more obvious and work a little bit better,

Kristin: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. And I didn’t want to set up anything where people were made to feel like unvalued team members, because they couldn’t do what was asked of them because of other commitments. Since that was in my control, I wanted to make sure that people felt welcome.

Rebecca: I’ve tried to even do that with long-term projects. In the field that I’m in, we tend to do things that go across class periods, but there’s always the “Are we going to do this outside of class or are we going to do this inside of class, and I try to have them do anything that needs to be collaborative, and decision making, in class, and then things that can be done on their own, even if that means doing some creative work, or whatever, outside of class. But those are independent things that can be done for the same reasons. And I find that students will try to manipulate that system, so that they’re gonna: “Oh, we’ll just do it outside of class, because we don’t want her to know whether or not we’re on top of something,” or whatever. But I call them out on it, because it’s really devaluing some of that exact thing. People have other commitments and things.

John: You mentioned, you started to use a backwards design approach where you started with the things you want them to remember five years later. Did you have to cut back on the breadth of the coverage in the class, to some extent, by doing that?

Kristin: Yes, I did. When I was going with the straight up cooperative learning approach, I did not have to cut back on the content at all. Without the full redesign, I found I could cover the same amount of material in straight lecture versus in a cooperative setting. But it was all coverage. It was just a different kind of coverage. When I approached it from a backward design perspective, and I really was able to focus on the objectives that I thought were important, I did have to reduce the amount of things that we were covering. I have no regrets about that, of course, because I completely recognize that covering material isn’t just covering it. What are students going to do with something I covered in class? They didn’t cover it, I was the one who was learning it and talking about it. So I’m much happier with an approach in which I am consistently hitting on the objectives that I really want them to recall, and that they are working hard to apply those throughout the semester.

John: If they’re not going to remember it passed the final exam, covering more material isn’t terribly useful.

Kristin: No.

John: We talked about that in a previous podcast with David Voelker, who talking about the coverage approach in History…

Kristin: Right.

John: …which is the same logic.

Kristin: Exactly. And I actually now consider that to be a complete waste of time. So why am I spending class time on something that I actually don’t really care if they remember, it’s not the most important thing to me, and they really don’t care if they remember.

Rebecca: You have some compelling arguments for why team-based learning and collaborative learning are good options. If one wanted to start moving in that direction, what would you suggest their first steps be?

Kristin: For team-based learning, there are a couple of great books that are very easy to approach. There are several great resources for team-based learning. Larry Michaelsen published a book in 2008, for example, that covers that from front to back. It gives examples of applications in different disciplines. There’s also a book published a few years later on team-based learning in the social sciences and humanities. That also covers the basics, but has applications that are more specific to social sciences and humanities. Team-based learning has really caught on in medical education and in business education. So in the original book, there are more application examples that are in MD preparation or in business schools. So if you’re looking for other examples, the second book might be a good choice as well. And that one is edited by Michael Sweet and Larry Michaelsen.

John: And in fact, I read your article, or

Kristin: Oh, did you?

John: …your chapter in there as background.

Kristin: I’m glad someone read it.

John: Now I have to read all the others. But, I, at least, did read that. It was very good. So for faculty who are moving to this, what are some pitfalls that they might run into? Or what sort of problems might they encounter?

Kristin: Team-based learning as being a much more structured approach… Michaelsen does a really nice job of laying out the pieces that he thinks are critical. And I agree they are critical. So, for example, he talks about explaining, and testing the model with students on the first class day, and you cannot skip it. So the very first class day, I give students an example individual application test, like they would get for their readiness assurance. It includes basic psychology knowledge that may or may not be present in the culture. So they have some chance of getting some of them right and some not. And then I have them do it as a team. And the team scores, of course, are always dramatically higher than the individual scores. And the team testing process is so much better. [LAIGHTER] It’s more pleasant and interesting and collaborative than they expect it to be. That simply going through that, it allays many of their fears about what a team is going to be like to work with. Plus, when they see that the team has tripled their individual score, they’re like, “Hey, maybe I could depend on other people to help me learn, and maybe this will pay off for me.” So going through an explanation of what the rationale is, having them experience it a little is really, really critical in helping them stay open minded while they experience it. And then regularly throughout the semester, I will keep reinforcing them with those messages. I’ll say, look at this amazing thing you guys did. You used all the intellectual resources around you, and you analyzed this difficult problem and came up with some great solutions. I’ll remind them how much they’re learning and what kinds of challenging tasks they’re able to do as a team when they have the preparation to do it, which helps as they’re starting to think “Well, wouldn’t it just be easier if I could do this by myself?” It helps them to kind of remember, ”Well, yes, but you wouldn’t be doing this, you would be doing something not as challenging, not as integrative.”

John: and probably not learning quite as much either&hellp;

Kristin: Yes. He also emphasizes an aspect that is also emphasized in cooperative learning… of helping the teams develop and giving them feedback, helping them give each other feedback. That’s also really critical, especially very early in the semester, as they’re starting to develop group norms and bond together to make sure that you don’t short the time in class for them to have some group processing time and to build their team skills. So, for example, when I taught last spring, I had a student who came to me after I think it was the second week. So it’s very early in the semester, and she said, “I really need to reassigned teams. My team hates me, they won’t make eye contact with me.” She was really upset. And I’m reluctant to reassign people teams, because often what they’re experiencing, they take with them. It’s not always a function of that team process. So we talked some, and I tried to get a handle on what she was experiencing. I knew where she sat, I had an idea of the team composition. And I asked her to try one more day, just one more day. And then we would talk about reassigning her teams. And that day, I was sure to build in plenty of time for group processing, where they talked about what they were doing well as a team and something to improve. Their team turned around immediately. She was a relatively assertive person, which I already knew. I knew that she could handle this. So she went back to the team. She was able to talk with her team about not feeling heard. They immediately turned around in the way that they were with her. And by the very next class day, they were a relatively high functioning team. They did well all semester. They brought doughnuts for each other. I mean, it was a really nice supportive group. What they needed was the time in class to do some processing. And if I, as the instructor, had been moving too fast, and not giving them time to do that, and not giving them a prompt to do that, it would have been a really negative experience for her. So, also building in time for the team to develop and prompts for them to do that.

Rebecca: So you mentioned liking to have a three-hour teaching slot.

Kristin: That’s my favorite. It’s not required.

Rebecca: So, in that amount of time, how much time would you designate towards this group processing, for example, to give people an idea of what that proportion or the amount of time to dedicate so that you don’t shortcut it and you don’t rush through it?

Kristin: If I were to do an activity that might take an hour, I might spend 10 minutes for group process, it doesn’t have to be very long, or even five. And you don’t have to do it every time, you could do 10 minutes after the first one or two more intensive activities, and then not do it for another few times… and another five minutes just every so often to help them resolve their underlying dissatisfactions and to recognize that what they’re doing is not just application activity, it’s also group interaction. So please take time to do both. Another really important required component that I didn’t mention is peer evaluation, I always incorporate peer evaluation as part of the grade.

John: How did you form the teams in these classes?

Kristin: They’re heterogeneous, first, with a very open process so students can see it happening and know there are no shenanigans… that this is all very open… talking about the rationale that people of different backgrounds bring different strengths. So you want a group that has people of different backgrounds, so you can have a larger kind of learning base between you. So usually, I’ll pick a few characteristics that might be important in that kind of background. And I will line them up around the room based on those characteristics. And if it’s 200 people, it’s a really long line. And then we count off. So when I teach introductory psychology, students who have had a high school psychology class usually are starting a big leg up on the other students. So I’ll include that as a characteristic. Sometimes I’ll include the distance that people are coming from, because then they have different experiences, depending on what class I might also include if their student athletes, just because if you put too many together in a team, then they’re all gone on the same day. They have interesting backgrounds, but they also have patterns of attendance and of absence that need to be adjusted around. And we’ll count off all the way around so people can see how the teams are made. But heterogeneous teams are really, really critical. Having students with pre-existing relationships will throw off the team process in a way that automatically excludes people that don’t have pre-existing relationships… plus they tend to be lower performing teams. And I don’t want to set that up on purpose.

John: One of my colleagues once did this in a class of, I think it was about 350 students, but he just sorted them alphabetically. So he had them organize himself that way, and it was a fairly long process. But, it was kind of amusing for those of us wandering by and just seeing…

Kristin: …this huge line… Yeah.

John: He didn’t do it that way In the future, he used other criteria.

Kristin: I’ve had colleagues that I’ve talked with that think that this is a long process. It’s not. You can sort 200 people in 10 minutes, and then you’re done for the whole semester,

John: Doing it alphabetically…

Kristin: takes a lot longer.

John: …can be more challenging, because they were self forming that… it didn’t convert rapidly.

Kristin: The other thing I never do is I don’t put the students who didn’t come the first day into a team, because there are characteristics about why they didn’t come the first day. If you put them all together in one team, they share some of those characteristics… It tends not to be a very high performing team. So I make sure they’re sorted out among the other teams. But that was one of the things that I learned in cooperative learning. That, before I did cooperative learning training, and I was assigning group work, I would assign people based on if you didn’t come the day we did the assignments, you were in another group. And that group typically did not do very well. And as an instructor, it’s my responsibility to create a learning environment in which students can excel, it’s on them whether they do their part. But if I’m setting up a team in ignorance, with predictable characteristics, so that they’re going to have a failure experience, that’s on me to correct. And it’s not on them. So afterwards, I felt guilty when I had come to a new realization. But, yeah, it’s my responsibility to set up an environment in which those students can be successful in their teams.

John: In your chapter in that book, you mentioned that when you switched over, it did affect your course evaluations a little bit. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Kristin: Just a little bit. But yes, it did. So when I was doing straight lecture, I was shooting for engaged lecture. And in psychology, you can build in little experiences, especially in introductory psychology, where the topics are changing frequently, you can always build things in that are kind of interesting. You can do a little optical illusion here and a little bit of memory trick there. And there’s these ways to build it in, but it is still basically straight lecture. And I got high evaluations for that. I was careful about trying to build those in every day, you know, every few minutes. And when I went to cooperative learning, where it was essentially the same approach, but in in a much more engaged and cooperative fashion, those evaluations stayed very high. Students knew each other, they were happy in class. When I went to team-based learning and I was actually asking every student to participate all the time, and be prepared in class in a way that their contributions were much more obvious than mine. My evaluations did drop just a little bit, not a lot, but a little. And I am grateful that I was teaching in a context where I knew that my department wouldn’t care. They were more interested that I was doing good teaching. And they understood the many factors that influence student evaluations. But I also recognize that it’s incumbent on me to help students understand how they are learning, what kinds of things encourage learning and retention, and then you kind of let the student evaluations fall where they may.

John: When I read that, it reminded me of that study that came out a few weeks ago from Harvard in their physics program, where they found that students in active learning classes did demonstrably better on tests, but they perceived their learning as being lower. So there was a pretty strong inverse relationship between their perception of learning and actual learning. That seems to be fairly common, there have been a number of other studies where what students think to be most effective, is often not what most enhances their learning.

Kristin: Right.

John: Do you have any other advice for our listeners, who might think about using either collaborative or team-based learning in their classes,

Kristin: The one thing I would say is that teaching a cooperative learning or a team-based learning structure class is a lot more fun. You have to be willing to give up control, because when you’re lecturing, you have absolute control… meaning even that students can’t ask you weird things, because you haven’t opened the door for that to happen. But when you structure the learning experience, and then you give up the control to the students, it is an exciting environment to be in. I wasn’t as tired when I was coming out of class. I was energized, you could feel the difference in the room just walking into class… they were excited and talking with each other. When I would circulate around before class started, they’re talking about the class instead of talking about other stuff. It completely changes the environment in the classroom in a way that I think really matches what I expect out of a university education for students, it creates a environment of intellectual enthusiasm around the topic that you’re teaching.

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

Kristin: That’s a great question. So right now I’m 100% administrative. And since I’m in a new position, in a new institution, I’m gonna spend some time figuring out all the newness pieces. But I’d like to go back to the classroom, at least for a course here and there when I can. There’s nothing different about students than there is about people. So I also think often about how what we do in the classroom, what we understand works and what we understand doesn’t work, how that applies in administrative settings as well. We know for example, that people tend to try and find the shortest path. So if they’re trying to learn something, they want to put in the least effort to learn it. If you ask a faculty member to do a task for the department, they are obviously going to choose the easiest path to do that… not necessarily the best path. So how do I take the experiences of learning and teaching, that in some ways are better understood to an environment of administration that in some ways is not as well understood? What kinds of lessons can I apply there as well?

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much. It’s been a really interesting conversation. I’m sure it gives a lot of people things to think about as they move forward in this semester and future semesters.

Kristin: 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.