277. Write Like a Teacher

Teaching faculty regularly help novices acquire new knowledge and skills. These same skills allow faculty to write effectively for audiences beyond their academic disciplines. In this episode, James Lang joins us to discuss his new book that is designed to help faculty write for broader audiences.

Jim is the author of six books, the most recent of which are: Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (now in a second edition); Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty; and On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching. He is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled: Write Like a Teacher. A former Professor of English and the Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, he stepped down from full-time academic work in 2021 to concentrate more fully on his writing and teaching. Jim has served as a keynote speaker and workshop leader at over 100 colleges and universities, including SUNY Oswego.

Shownotes

  • Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. Hachette UK.
  • Lang, J. M. (2021). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. 2nd ed. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Lang, J. M. (2013). Cheating lessons. Harvard University Press.
  • Lang, J. M. (2008). On course: A week-by-week guide to your first semester of college teaching. Harvard University Press.
  • The Saratoga Tea and Honey Company
  • Articles by James Lang in the Chronicle of Higher Education
  • Sarah Rose Cavanagh (2023). Mind Over Monsters. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 272. January 18.
  • Julie Jensen
  • Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. A. (2022). Inclusive teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the college classroom. West V

Transcript

John: Teaching faculty regularly help novices acquire new knowledge and skills. These same skills allow faculty to write effectively for audiences beyond their academic disciplines. In this episode, we discuss a new book that is designed to help faculty write for broader audiences.

[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 James Lang. Jim is the author of six books, the most recent of which are Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (now in a second edition), Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, and On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching. He is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled: Write Like a Teacher. A former Professor of English and the Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, he stepped down from full-time academic work in 2021 to concentrate more fully on his writing and teaching. Jim has served as a keynote speaker and workshop leader at over 100 colleges and universities, including SUNY Oswego. Welcome back, Jim.

Jim: Thank you.

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

Jim: Of course. Always.

John: …still David’s Tea or some new tea?

Jim: No, actually, I have two children at Skidmore. And there’s a tea shop there called The Saratoga Tea and Honey Company. I have to go to Saratoga Springs every few months, and I stock up on tea there. So I totally favor robust black teas, so I’m either drinking English breakfasts or Irish breakfast, Irish breakfast gives you a little more of a boost.

Rebecca: It sure does, it’s one of my favorites too.

John: And I am drinking a Tea Forte black currant tea, but with some honey from Saratoga Tea and Honey.

Jim: Ahh!

John: I love that tea shop. I go there at least two or three times a year. There’s lots of conferences up there.

Rebecca: Yeah. And I have Awake tea this afternoon, so I can be more awake this afternoon. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: I know that feeling.

Rebecca: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your new book project. Can you tell us a little bit about the project?

Jim: Sure. So this is my first book focused on writing, even though I’ve always been interested in writing and about how academics can reach wider audiences for their work. And the premise of the book is that the reading experience for nonfiction work, whether it’s an essay or book, should be a learning experience. And so we want to think about how do people learn from the page, as opposed to learning in the classroom or outside of the classroom in real life settings. And so the argument that I make is that those of us who teach, whether we are academics or teaching at other levels, we have either sort of education or experience or instincts that help people learn. And so this knowledge that we’ve gained from like a doctoral programs, or our teaching experiences, or we have good instincts about what to do in the classroom, and we can take that knowledge and put it into our writing practices in order to help create good learning experiences for people on the page. So that’s the core argument of the book. And what I try to do is bring together the many years I’ve been writing about teaching and learning, and sort of take the research I’ve done and arguments I’ve made about effective teaching, and to put them into this new context. And my goal really is for academics who want to try to reach out to broader audiences, whether that’s academics outside of their discipline, or even outside of academic readers altogether, and to help them achieve the goals that they might have about how to promote their work. And a big part of it is we have the opportunity to make the world a better place, if we can help readers understand the importance of the work that we do. So that’s kind of a sense of what’s kind of driving me into these arguments. I think it’s a good idea if they can, and they’re interested in doing that, reach out to readers outside of their discipline and I want to be able to help them to do that.

John: So much academic writing is written to a very narrow academic audience, which tends to exclude most people from reading the work that most academics do. And as you said, academics, especially those who are heavily involved in teaching, have skills in taking complex concepts and trying to relay them to an audience that does not have the same background. But most academics don’t tend to do that. And you seem to be in a really good place to write a book like this, given all the writing that you’ve done, your role as the longtime editor of The West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning, as well as your role as a faculty member. So how did these roles come together to help you prepare for this book? 4:09:25

Jim: So obviously, I’ve had a lot of experience writing as a writer myself, trying to reach out to outside audiences beyond my discipline. And I think one of the things you just said is important. Most academics know how to write like, this is something we have to do to get degrees and promotion and tenure and all that kind of stuff. We know how to do it. But when we’re writing to other academics, they’re in our discipline, so we have a lot of shared disciplinary background information. And then we also can sort of assume a little bit more attention to our work, essentially, from disciplinary readers because I can push your attention a little further than I can someone who is outside of the discipline, so like, you’re willing to stay with me for a little bit longer to go a little bit more deeply into the core ideas. But a non-academic reader needs more information, they need some more background information. They need to be kind of guided along with kind of signposts along the way, to be told stories, kind of different forms of evidence. So all these things are things that we do in the classroom. And so I think one of the things I really want to be able to do with the book is to sort of empower people. And my work as a writer about education, I view that as empowering as well. I want to be able to show people, for example, in my book on Small Teaching, I want to show people, there’s a number of small things that you can do, that are going to make a difference. And I hope that’s an empowering message, and I hope this message will be the same for writers. You know how to do this stuff, you’ve been doing it for a long time, and you’ve seen that other people do it. So it’s a kind of a process of kind of taking your knowledge here and just applying it to a new context. Now, to get to your question, I’ve been trying to do that for a long time. And I have a column I’ve written for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I’m approaching 200 columns at this point. And then I also have always been interested in seeing where else my writing could go. I like to challenge myself as a writer. So I’ve reached out to places like newspapers and magazines, and probably have a couple of dozen essays published in those places. And some of my books also kind of reached out to broader audiences. So first of all, I was drawing from my own experiences. And that’s not just about the writing, but also the process, like what does it look like to reach out to an editor, for example, at a major newspaper and try to get your work in that forum. So with the writing, but also then the process of getting yourself published and promoting your work, the book kind of covers all that stuff. But also, I think the reason that I really kind of wanted to address this topic is because I edit a book series as well. And so I’ve acquired, I think, 15 books for that series. Now, I co-edit with Michelle Miller. But I did probably all those first 12 to 15 ones that I worked with the authors all the way through from the first getting that query email to getting it through being approved, revised, and then getting it out there and trying to help them with promotion. So like guiding multiple people through that process, which I love, it’s like one of my great joys in my life now is to help people get their first books published. I really learned a lot. And I kind of found myself saying the same thing to authors, like, “Here’s a few things that you need to do that can help make this book more successful.” And so with that knowledge, I kind of want to say, “Okay, I want to be able to put this stuff down.” I get all these hopeful email queries when people have a lot of hope in their voices, or even on the page. And, you know, they want to get their books published, and they’re stumbling on some very common obstacles. And so I wanted to be able to have this stuff available in print so I could not only share with those folks, people who are looking to publish with us, but anybody who wants to publish, whether it’s a book or even an essay. So I do try to cover both of those things as well, writing books, but also writing about essays or various kinds of media platforms: newspapers, magazines, websites.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, because no matter what discipline you’re in, you’re usually trained on how to publish in a very particular way. And then all the other ways seem very mystical.

Jim: Absolutely, that relates to the fact that we’re so very familiar with the sort of processes and the kind of arguments that we make in our discipline. But then we kind of just jump a little bit away from that and we’re kind of in a different world. That’s true, not only of the publishing process, but also the writing process. So like, one of the things I often have to explain to authors is you have a disciplinary tradition of evidence. So in your discipline, evidence looks like this, right? It’s numbers, or its experiments, or its literary texts, whatever it might be, but you’re trying to reach now beyond your discipline. And so those people are completely used to seeing evidence in this form. And it’s fine for them to just sort of stay in that place. But when you’re reaching out to other readers, in the same way as a teacher, you have to try to reach out to multiple kinds of learners, you have to do the same thing as a writer. So yes, I might write for an audience of people who are interested in writing in literature, but I have to be aware that some people are gonna say, “Okay, well show me the facts,” essentially, right, or the statistics, or what experiments have been done to sort of show this is really true? So like, as a writer who’s trying to reach people from multiple fields, or even outside of academic fields, I need to think about how am i varying my evidence? What kind of evidentiary traditions am I drawing from? So like, when you start looking at these kinds of things, you see, yes, the things that I normally do in my academic writing, I have the skills, and I just have to learn to kind of expand them a little bit and sort of move them around a little bit in order to reach some different kinds of folks.

John: We’ve been doing two reading groups a year here, and most of the books that we’ve worked on have either been books that you’ve written, or books in the West Virginia University Press series. And there’s some things I’ve noticed that tend to be common to all of those. And I’m curious to see if you’d agree, [LAUGHTER] but all of them are very solidly backed by evidence with appropriate citations, either in the footnotes or in the bibliographies. But they all tend to be free of disciplinary jargon and they tend to have a lot of use of narrative where they’re bringing in examples with actual faculty members from a variety of disciplines, showing the wide range of applicability of the techniques that are being discussed. Was that something you tended to focus on explicitly? And is that something you encourage faculty moving into these new areas to focus on?

Jim: Absolutely. I mean, those things are definitely core messages that I’m giving to authors. The first is having some kind of practical application to it. Now that should be a true teaching book, right? There’s to be some kind of takeaway for the reader. But no matter what you’re doing, I always try to emphasize to academic authors, there should be something that the reader can take away that’s concrete. It might be a new way of thinking about the world, but it could be new advice about something, how to do something differently in your life, join a movement, or make a change in something you’re doing. So having some kind of takeaway, I think, is really important. But again, when talking about the sort of evidence piece of this, the fact that stories are really important in this because stories, they’re not like a logicians perspective, maybe they’re not the best forms of evidence, but they still really help people understand the ideas, and so they put the ideas into sort of a place where I can try to relate them, and see like how my experiences compare to the experience in the story. And so one of the things that I often will see academic authors who have this sense, “I should give an example or two,” those examples are often very lifeless, they’re like a one sentence sort of very abstract description of something. And I try to say to people, “Look, if you’re gonna tell a story, tell it well, use images, give me a little bit of detail about it, the story is going to really resonate with me when it’s a story that I kind of enjoy reading and that I can somehow try to relate to.” I kind of came to this discovery for myself as a writer, because I typically tell some personal stories in my own writing, right? So Small Teaching includes a story about me ordering green tea at my local coffee shop. And so what I’ve discovered is that when I go to like conferences or workshops, people will remember that story. And they’ll use it to kind of reach out and make a connection with me. And so like, I’ve also had people say, “You told this story about teaching your daughter how to drive and then I was thinking about that when I was doing the same thing and I had the same ideas that you did.” And so it creates these opportunities to let people share their own experiences with the book or with the author. I try to tell people, you don’t have to share your whole personal life, but just occasionally, having stories like this, whether they’re about you or somebody else, they do help people see the material in a new way.

Rebecca: It definitely makes them far more readable and brings things to life. I’m curious about this book project and the timing, and why write this book now?

Jim: Yeah, so this book is sort of coming out of, first of all, the West Virginia University series definitely has been growing and so it’s really kind of exploded in terms of the number of titles that we’re putting out. And so seeing more and more of these kinds of issues coming up in the proposals in the books that we are seeing, and so I wanted to try to get these ideas out, as I’m going out through new manuscripts and working with new authors. That was a part of it. I also had a kind of big personal issue that came up with me over the last couple of years. And so that gave me a new sense of commitment to this kind of work, not only teaching for me, but also about writing. And you kind of feel like this kind of sense of that I wanted to start working with writers in a more formal way, both in this book, and then maybe going forward and also doing more developmental editing for academic authors who would like to expand their audiences. So this is like a moment where I’m trying to make a transition here. I still want to teach and I’m still going to write about teaching. But I do want to also think about moving more into the space of working with writers and writing about writing myself. And part of that was… the short version of the story, which is a long story. [LAUGHTER] In October of 2021, I was diagnosed with something called myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart. And that often heals itself for people when they get it. But in my case, it went the other way, this happens sometimes. It kind of essentially destroyed my heart over a space of a few weeks, the time between I went into the hospital, just because I was having like an irregular heartbeat… otherwise, I was fine… and the time I was on advanced life support, it might have been two weeks. And so this sort of crashed into our lives. I was on advanced life support for a couple months. I wasn’t expecting to survive, but I did. And I got a heart transplant and I had a stroke during the surgery, which is a long surgery. I woke up from all that. And finally, initially, I couldn’t speak also because of the stroke I had. It was complete aphasia, so I had to learn to speak again with flashcards and speech therapy, and my wife would work with me every day. So after all of that, that kind of focuses your mind a little bit, it kind of helps you realize, okay, you only got so many years left on the planet, what do you really want to do in those years? And so it has helped me realize that I want to still continue teaching. I’ve made incredible connections across the world with teachers by writing about teaching, and I love to talk to academics. They’re the audiences I feel most comfortable with. But I feel like at this point, now I have something different to offer them, not just sort of advice about teaching, but also to help them become more successful as writers.

John: And now you’re sharing it with writers, not just the dozen and a half or so writers you were working with at West Virginia, but with writers all over the world. And I think that’s providing a really nice service.

Jim: Thank you.

Rebecca: It’s amazingly incredible, for sure.

John: We’re awfully glad you have recovered so amazingly well. And I remember seeing you post about that on Twitter after you were already in the process of recovering and I had wondered why you had gone into the background there and you hadn’t posted anything for quite a while and it was a bit of a shock. And I think when you posted that you got many, many people commenting.

Jim: Yes, yes, definitely. The community was very supportive, not only the community of my family and my friends here where I live, but also many people around the world, sent me messages and asked about how things were going and offered support and prayers and thoughts and all that stuff. It was very heartening.

Rebecca: You mentioned multiple times about kind of shifting gears a little bit or shifting focus. But to me, if we look at the things that you’ve been involved in, and the things that you’ve written about, you’re really staying true to faculty development. [LAUGHTER] It’s just faculty development with a slightly different focus, but certainly the kind of support that we’ve seen from you in different ways of faculty life.

Jim: Yeah. And actually, in my last years at Assumption, before I decided to step away from full-time academic work, I was moving in that direction as well, because I was responsible for our new faculty orientation as the director of our teaching center. I like to work with junior faculty to help them navigate the different channels of academic life, including service and research and teaching. And so because I had visited so many other institutions where I had often been invited to give workshops or lectures, and had visited many teaching centers and had opportunities to have dinner with lots of people around the country and talk about academic life, I felt like I was kind of gathering a lot of good ideas from all these different places. And I wanted to be able to bring those ideas back to my own campus. So I was always trying to give this information or these ideas or this advice to faculty I knew and were working with. And again, as I’m kind of just stepping away from those concrete roles on campus, although I’m still going to continue to teach on a part-time basis, I want to be able to keep expanding that work outside to other academics who could benefit, not only in their teaching, but also in their goals as writers too.

Rebecca: I think it’s helpful to hear stories as faculty think about different ways that their faculty lives unfold over time, and how that might evolve, as they shift focus on things and maybe want to focus more on teaching or want to focus more on research or more on writing as they develop over time.

Jim: Yeah, this was definitely something that characterized my career. I started as a normal tenure-track faculty member in English and I did that for quite a few years. And I was just kind of looking for a change, a lot like many people after you get tenure, and I was kind of looking for something new to see like, “Okay, I’ve kind of cleared that hurdle, what could I do differently now?” And then I became the director of our Honors Program. And that kind of captured my interest for a while. And then I got kind of interested in these kinds of semi- or part-time administrative positions. And so then became the director of our teaching center. And so I think it’s a good point, especially as we move along in our academic careers, we can look out for other opportunities, and make shifts and draw on different strengths over the course of our careers. So stepping away from full-time work was a big one. And I actually made that decision just about five months before I went to the hospital. So I had five months of like a “early retirement.” [LAUGHTER] But that was a big decision. But I still am very happy with what I’m doing now. And I’m sure gonna continue to look for other ways to challenge myself. And again, kind of keep that focus going on faculty development, though, because as I said, I just was at Williams College last week and giving some presentations there, went out to dinner with folks. And I was just kind of sitting there thinking, “These are my people.” Like, I feel very comfortable with the faculty. I love to have the fascinating conversations that learning about people’s… all the strange stuff they research and the very specific things that people write about and think about, the cool courses they teach. I just love those conversations. I love being in those rooms. And I kind of want to keep doing that work. And as a writer, it’s a huge audience, right? The amount of people in this country, for example, just alone, that are working in higher education, right? So I’m not limiting myself as a writer, I’ve got this huge audience that I can try to reach. And I just feel very comfortable writing to folks in those positions.

John: And you’re still serving as a teacher, just to a much broader audience than when you were in the classroom.

Jim: Yes.

John: In January, we released a podcast with Sarah Rose Cavanagh, and she talked about how you were working with her on a writer’s group. Is that a strategy that you’d recommend for faculty who are working on writing?

Jim: Yeah, writers’ groups are essential. All my recent books have emerged from writers’ groups. There’s different kinds of writers’ groups. So it’s worth noting the kind of taxonomy of these different kinds of ways to work with other people on your writing. The first is to sort of get a bunch of people who sit together and try to write in each other’s company, essentially, right? So that’s just: you make a time, identify a place, we come together and we kind of support each other, just sort of by being together essentially, right? So that’s one kind of writers group. There’s an accountability kind of group, that’s a second kind, where we’re gonna say, “Okay, everyone needs to have 2000 words by this date, everyone’s going to finish their articles by this date.” And then we’re gonna get together, we’re going to celebrate that or, for example, we’re all working on an article, we’ll get together every month and we’ll share things that we’re struggling with or the things that we’re doing well. It’s almost kind of like a little bit writer’s group therapy, essentially, we’re like supporting each other. The last kind is critique groups, and that’s what I’ve always been part of, where we actually send each other’s work in progress and we read it and then we get together and we give each other feedback. So to me, you can have any kind of writer’s group that you want to be in is going to be good, it’s going to support your writing, and that’s a good idea. Julie Jensen does a lot of work on writing, she argues that academics should not be in content critique groups, because you don’t need people outside of your discipline to be giving you feedback, because that’s going to happen as part of the peer review process. But if you’re going to write for readers outside of your discipline, then I think content critique groups are actually essential, because we’re gonna get from that is that people who are outside of your discipline, who don’t have the same background information that you do… “actually, I’m confused by this, like, you give me this big explanation, but there’s something that I’m missing here.” You’re not gonna get that from somebody in your discipline, because they’re gonna know what the background information is. So I think content critique groups are really important if your ambition is to write for people outside of your discipline. And so content critique groups, for me, they have the function also of accountability, because we meet essentially, once a month, and we have to have something for that meeting. We don’t put a hard number on it. But for me, it might be a Chronicle essay, or it could be current chapter. And I know that group meeting is not going to do anything for me, unless I’ve given something to the group. It’s helpful for me to give feedback to other people too, but I want it to be helpful to me, so I make sure that something is ready for it. So essentially, it’s an accountability group and we also talk about problems too. It’s like it does the other things, but I just think it’s really important for writers to have someone outside of their narrow field, give them their perspective on whatever you’re writing.

John: One thing has struck me as being common with each of those groups is that issue of accountability. We often refer to it in economics as a commitment device, that when you have that deadline, when you have to provide something at a certain time, or even if you’re just going to sit together and write at a certain time, it’s so easy to postpone things like writing and having that commitment makes it so much more likely that people will actually achieve their goal.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely, wespecially when you’re doing a longer project, like a book, you’d start the process with, like a deadline two years away, right? But the writers group, for me, gives me the structure, I need to actually finish it, because I know, “Okay, I want to get this chapter done, so that I can then get the next one done. And if I do all those things, at the end of the two years, I’m gonna have a book. Otherwise, there’s no hard deadlines, except for the one. And so to produce 80,000 words, for something that’s two years away, we’re not good at that kind of thing, [LAUGHTER]as humans, unless we really kind of put deadlines along the way. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Are you implying that faculty needs structure? … and scaffolding too? [LAUGHTER]

Jim: Yeah, absolutely. Giving structure. And that reminds me, that’s another thing that I like, as a part of the book actually is thinking about the importance of structure, not only for writers, but also for readers. When you look at an academic article, for example, in social science disciplines, it’s got a set structure to it. It’s got the introduction, it’s got the literature review, the experiment, the method, that kind of thing. But if you’re in like a humanities discipline, and you’re looking at reading an article about like literary theory, it’s just gonna be like, sort of paragraph after paragraph after paragraph like just kind of a long series of paragraphs, which just kind of guide you from beginning to end. But when you look at work that is published outside of the academic world, it often has lots of sections, subheadings, little titles along the way, those things are really important to help a non-academic reader through complex material in the same way we do it in the classroom. We help students, we guide them through our slides, for example, our stuff on the board, or like dividing the class in three or four parts or something like that. Again, this is stuff that we kind of do instinctually in the classroom, because we know the students are gonna zone out. [LAUGHTER] So we kind of guide them through the material, we need to do the same thing in our writing, too. And I like to think about these as attention tools of writing. And so the use of breaking up the text, and that’s sometimes may mean just like sections and subheadings, and all that kind of stuff. But also like bullets, you don’t need to go crazy, but you want to make sure that you are breaking up the page, or the argument, with these structural elements.

Rebecca: Jim, you’re suddenly like an interaction designer. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: Okay. Wait, what do you mean exactly by that?

Rebecca: So, an interaction designer would say something like for usability purposes, you would do all the things that you just described, and they’re also accessibility principles. So they’re good for so many reasons.

Jim: Yeah. Okay, I like that.

Rebecca: It’s gold. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: I like that.

John: And right before I arrived here, I went over to our provost office to pick up a couple of big cartons of books by Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan from West Virginia University Press for our reading group this semester. And one of their main arguments is the importance of structure in helping people make connections to help break down complex topics into these manageable chunks to help people understand things much better. And it sounds like this is, as you and Rebecca have both said, is really important in many, many different contexts.

Jim: Yeah, I believe their work about high structure is so important. And I’ve definitely kind of imported that into the chapter in which I discuss these issues. But the other thing to think about again, from like a reading perspective, so if I’m reading a work, for example, I’m not going to sit and read a book, a 300-page book by an academic writer in one sitting. So I need places to stop and come back. And so maybe I can’t get a 30-40 page chapter in. But if I have opportunities to stop, [LAUGHTER] close the book, and come back to it, and I can come back to a subheading, which is going to tell me, “Okay, that’s what next. Oh, right, that’s what I was just before, and here’s what’s coming.” These are opportunities to come away, come back, and be able to return to the argument, and not be lost when I return to it. And this is just probably always the way that we’ve read. But this is how we’re definitely doing it now, as we’re bombarded with so many different things that can interrupt us. So having those kinds of opportunities to pause and renew the reading experience are important.

Rebecca: But the use of subheadings, in particular, I find helpful as a reader to just get reoriented, especially when you’re coming from a different place. And then I need to transition to an entirely different place, just looking back to those couple of subheadings that came before can immediately get you into that place again really efficiently. So I love it when writers do that, for me as a reader.

Jim: If they’re done well, it will show you an overview of the whole argument, essentially. So I think those are really important to help guide the reader through what they call the through line. The through line is the thread that connects everything in the book, the overall argument, and the subheadings, kind of hanging off that through line. And so I think they really are important for academic writers to do for other kinds of audiences.

Rebecca: Heck, I would like it sometimes just with my own discipline… more subheadings, please. [LAUGHTER]

Jim: I agree, I agree.

John: This is a little bit different. But one thing that really bothers me when I’m reading a novel on my Kindle late at night. I always like to stop, if not at a chapter break, at least at a paragraph break. And I was trying to read last night and I had to skim through about six or seven pages on there before this paragraph ended, [LAUGHTER] and it helps to have those little breaks that are logical stopping points. And writers don’t always do that.

Jim: No, no, one of the points may be I’m trying to push you through some difficult materials, so I get that. But even if you don’t have the sub headings, for example, if you look at the articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, they might not have subheadings, some of them do, but sometimes will just be a break. So like the paragraph ends, there’s like some whitespace, and then a new section starts, even that’s better than just the sort of constant unbroken series of paragraphs. And I also think it’s also just good for visual, your eye glosses over when you open to a page, and it’s just a huge block of text. That’s intimidating. And so the subheadings, the breaks, all those things, they give a break both for your eye and for your brain.

Rebecca: And even just encourage a moment of pause and reflection, like, “Oh, we’re moving to a new thing. Do I know what I just read? [LAUGHTER] …so I can move to the next thing?” I’m at that moment to double check.

Jim: Yeah, that’s true. They’re great transitions, too. And those moments of transition are often the times when we step back and say, “Okay, so I have this, and what am I curious about as we’re gonna go forward down here.

John: One of the things you mentioned earlier is that your book includes a discussion of the whole process of publishing. Because while academics do a lot of writing all through their academic careers, most academics have not been very heavily involved in publishing. And I don’t think most of them have many ways of getting that information unless they happen to know other people who have been successful in it. So having a book like yours, I think, would be really helpful in providing faculty with information that they just don’t have in their own experiences.

Jim: Yeah, so there’s a chapter which just focuses on guiding people from a query to publication. So like, what are the actual steps of this process? What are the kinds of things you will need in order to be able to get to that moment when you see your work in print? And so, essentially, I tried to boil it down to four things: three stages and then one sort of central recommendation about how to get this process started. The three things are essentially the query, the query is sort of the short email they’re gonna give. And for me, those are really important because they give me a sense of what’s the question or the problem that you’re addressing? What’s your argument? And why are you the right person to do it? So like, to me a query has got to do those three things, but not much more than that. It’s not like an academic job letter, where it’s five big paragraphs that covers two pages. No, I want to be able to read this thing very quickly and get a sense of who you are, what the project is, what’s going to be interesting, what’s unique about it, all those things. A query letter is like our handshake, where we’re going to kind of introduce ourselves to each other. The proposal, often, that’s all you need for a newspaper or magazine is a query and then the article or something. But for a book, you have to have this next stage of the process, which is a book proposal. And those are a lot of work. A book proposal might be 50 pages, because it’s going to include a overview of the book, which is usually like one to two pages, it’s going to have an author biography, which might just be a page or so, it’s going to have a chapter outline and that might be five or 10 pages. A chapter outline, not just a table of contents with like titles, but at least a paragraph or two for each chapter, and then a writing sample, which should be like at least like a chapter. So that we’re talking about like a 50-page document here. And it also should include… this is gonna vary from publisher to publisher… but it probably will also include a short analysis of the competition, so that you can use that as a way to show what is gonna be different or new or unique about your book. And sometimes publishers will also want like a marketing or promotion overview, like what are you going to do to help support the marketing and promotion of this book, for example. If you have a podcast, if you have a huge social media presence, if you are planning to attend a bunch of conferences in this field, you have connections, all those things can contribute to a sense of what kind of marketing or promotion you would be able to offer for your book. So that’s a big document. It’s really important when we see like student writing, for example, or those of us who teach student writing, sometimes the first page or two kind of gives you a sense of, okay, kind of the quantity of the students writing. Often, the same thing might be true for the proposal. From a couple pages, I can usually get a sense of how experienced the author is, is this project right for our particular series, what kind of writer they’re going to be, in terms of both of their writing, in terms of what kind of person they’re gonna be to work with. But as long as I get over those sort of initial couple pages and I’m still interested, then the proposal really has to show me that it’s going to work as a full book. Once you get past that, then it kind of just goes through the different processes of what’s going to happen to your book when you turn it in, essentially: the review process, copy editing, proofreading, working with a cover designer, the author questionnaire, which is a huge document that is going to help support what you’re going to be able to do support the book. And then also, often there’ll be a call with the marketing and promotion team, so kind of guiding people through that whole process. So those are the three stages I talk about in the book and try to give basic information and advice about that. But the thing I start with is, whenever possible, submit your work to a person. And what I mean by that is not just submitting to “Dear editor” or something like that, do a little bit of basic research on the publication and the person that is going to be sort of giving the initial review of your work. And there’s easy ways to do that, you can look on the web pages of the publisher, acquisition editors will typically have like a short description of what they acquire. You can also look at, like what other books they published. And one of the ways to do this is very simple. Most books will have an acknowledgement section, you can see who edited the book, and whether it was an agent. And so you see those two things. And if you look at books in your area, at the publisher you’re trying to target, you’ll be able to piece together a sense of “Okay, what kind of books does this editor tried to publish?” then you can sort of reach out to that person and say, “Look, I’m a huge fan of this book, which I know you edited and I feel like mine would fit well with this series that you’re overseeing,” whatever it might be. So try to get a little sense of the person that you’re writing to. You can be specific about why you are writing to that particular person at that particular publisher. And that’s something that we don’t have to do typically for academic disciplinary journals or something like that, right? We’re just sending it off to like a email box or just sort of being very objective, “Dear editor, here’s my work,” essentially. But as you’re reaching outside of your disciplinary journals, or academic books, you want to be able to be a little bit more deliberate about reaching out to a specific person.

Rebecca: What you’re describing also sounds a lot more relational, just generally.

Jim: Definitely, and I also make the argument in the book that it sometimes can seem like an adversarial relationship, sometimes between you as an author and an editor, because they’re like the gatekeepers. And they’re going to tell you, “No, we don’t have the money for that table to put in your book,” or an sometimes you can get frustrated as an author. But what’s really important to remember is, we are on your side, the editor always wants you to be successful. And so sometimes we might say things which are like, “You shouldn’t do this,” or “we don’t want to do this,” and “we can’t do that.” And that can be frustrating for an author. But I promise you, I am not like waiting there to kind of stamp an F on your query, [LAUGHTER]. I want you to be successful. Every query that comes in, there’s like a little sort of grain of hope that I’m hoping that this is going to be an amazing book, it’s going to change this person’s life. That’s the best scenario for me, I help someone write their first book, and it’s really successful. And so I’m hoping for that for everybody that writes to me. And I think that the same thing is true for editors. So always keep that in mind. These are the people that want you to be successful, and you have to treat them accordingly. Just be aware of that in terms of how you respond to them, react to them, and then you try to be like a good citizen of the book in the process.

Rebecca: So Jim, when can we get this book?

Jim: Yeah, so I’m finishing it right now, actually. I have one chapter left, I expect to finish it within the next month. So it’s probably be late 2023 or early 2024.

Rebecca: So I’m looking forward to it.

Jim: Thanks.

John: And as you mentioned before, that publishing process does take a lot of time.

Jim: That’s one of the places where it can seem adversarial to an author, right? Why are you taking so long to do this. I gave you a manuscript, why does it take a year to come out? But, I try to go through that stuff in the book. But there are good reasons. And all those reasons are is trying to help you make the most successful book

John: incentives are compatible between the author and the editor, because both parties benefit from having successful books.

Jim: Absolutely.

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

Jim: Yeah, so this book. It’s funny because I had the idea for this book. And I’d written the proposal for it partially, because I had also left my full-time academic position. I was thinking about these issues. And so I sent the proposal actually out before I got sick. And then I signed the contract in the hospital. actually. [LAUGHTER] So that kind of renewed my commitment to it. So that’s kind of been all I’ve been doing since then. But then once I finish that, and I just have already in my mind now, probably I’m going to write some kind of memoir of what I have experienced and what I’ve learned from that. My first two books actually were memoirs. And so I haven’t been in that genre in a while, but I think I had experiences now there’s probably memoir worthy at this point. [LAUGHTER] So yeah, that’s probably the next thing that will happen.

John: Well, we’re looking forward to reading all of them. So we wish you success on that. And it’s great talking to you again.

Jim: Likewise. Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah, thanks, Jim.

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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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255. Thriving Through Behavioral Science

Many students pursue learning strategies that are not aligned with their long-term objectives. In this episode, Erik Simmons joins us to discuss how principles of social and behavioral sciences can be used to help students achieve their objectives. Erik is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Boston College School of Social Work. He is the author of a chapter in the Picture a Professor project edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Show Notes

  • Neuhaus, Jessamyn (forthcoming, 2022). Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. West Virginia University Press.
  • Research Program on Children and Adversity – Boston College School of Social Work
  • Michie, S., Van Stralen, M. M., & West, R. (2011). The behaviour change wheel: a new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions. Implementation science, 6(1), 1-12.
  • Michie, S., Hyder, N., Walia, A., & West, R. (2011). Development of a taxonomy of behaviour change techniques used in individual behavioural support for smoking cessation. Addictive behaviors, 36(4), 315-319.
  • Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.

Transcript

John: Many students pursue learning strategies that are not aligned with their long-term objectives. In this episode, we discuss how principles of social and behavioral sciences can be used to help students achieve their objectives.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Erik Simmons. Erik is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Boston College School of Social Work. He is the author of a chapter in the Picture a Professor project edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus. Welcome, Erik!

Erik: Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, John, for having me.

John: We’re very happy to have you here. Today’s teas are:… Erik, are you drinking tea?

Erik: I am drinking tea. I have a Tower of London house blend. It’s a black tea with a little honey infusion. And it has been keeping me going. So I just finished the full pack today. So this is very timely to be asking what I’m drinking. I’m gonna have to remember this one.

Rebecca: Awesome. Finally, a tea drinker, John. [LAUGHTER] We get a lot of coffee drinkers around here.

Erik: Do people usually slot in their coffee selection?

Rebecca: Sometimes? Yeah, sometimes… or the water. There’s a lot of water.

Erik: Okay, well, it’s good for you.

John: And Diet Coke.

Erik: Diet Coke also can keep you going.

Rebecca: I have a Scottish afternoon tea today.

John: And I have a wild blueberry black tea.

Erik: Oh, wow, that sounds delicious.

John: It really is.

Erik: Quite tasty.

Rebecca: Before we discuss your chapter in the Picture a Professor project, can you tell us a little bit about your dissertation research on behavioral change in low resource coastal communities that rely on marine ecosystems in Indonesia and the Philippines.

Erik: I’d love to talk about that, because it’s a project that’s very near and dear to my heart. And I found it very innovative in that we were taking our lab-based research on psychological and behavioral sciences and taking them to the field to help improve the lives and well being of families and children in Southeast Asia. And really what we had identified was one core facet that undercuts almost every wicked problem that we experience that implicates human behavior. And that’s the need for behavioral sciences. So we saw in these projects that, if we could take evidence-based programs, adapt them to the problem at hand to make sure they’re culturally sensitive, and make sure they’re acceptable by the communities, you can change a whole range of different problems and different behaviors that can help improve wellbeing and, in this case, improve the environmental sustainability of these communities as well, who are very reliant on their aquaculture and on the natural resources around them. What we were seeing in that project especially, was that, hey, if you take a whole bunch of people, and if you can provide them with programs that are meant to engage with their behaviors, their social systems and beyond, you can improve not only their lives, their health and wellbeing, their family functioning, but also things like the environment. So that’s where we were going for. And it was not only an exciting process, it was fun. But it puts us on the front line of working with people, which is something that I’ve always had a passion for.

John: Now, this is a little bit aside from the general focus of the podcast, but what type of behavioral interventions did you work with there?

Erik: What we tend to do in my work and the work of the many seminal, prestigious, esteemed professors I’ve worked with in the past is we take these blended complex interventions that target a couple of different pillars within your life. So we’ll have a little bit from an intervention that focus specifically on your parenting capabilities, per se. We’ll have a little bit on the ability or psychosocial capabilities or capacities for you to self regulate and to goal set. We’ll have a little bit on your emotional regulation. We’ll have a little bit on your social behaviors to help recalibrate social norms within your communities, there’s social dynamics, and we throw all those together, we workshop them with the communities, it’s always a co-building process in the work that I do. And what you end up with is something that can target internal factors, external factors, social norms, and social dynamics within their communities. And of course, as we were working there, certain environmental modifications around behaviors such as recycling, engagement with fishing behaviors. So we take these homunculus type of behavioral interventions that all have evidence bases, but we cut them up, we chop them a little bit, we combine them with each other to get a fit for purpose intervention, because we never go with a one size fits all.

John: You’re currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Research Program on Children and Adversity. Could you tell us a little bit about that program?

Erik: Yes, absolutely. It’s another global project, as you guys will get a sense for here, I really like going about helping communities all around the world. And what we’re currently working on is a home visiting intervention. And all that means is you essentially have an active coach who’s an interventionist, they’re a lay worker within the community, currently, I’m working in Rwanda, and they will go to a home and help a family with young children. And now these are the families, John and Rebecca, here that are the most vulnerable in Rwanda, families that really need a lot of assistance. And they have someone who will flexibly schedule with them, come to their home, help them with the initial years, I believe it’s zero to 36 months, or the first three years, assessing similarly once again, parenting capabilities, family dynamics, and then interactions with your child in those first three years, because what we know is that the lifespan development trajectory has a wide range of potential, but as we grow the range of this trajectory slowly, slowly shrinks. So starting early is really important to making sure that individuals have the highest promising potential for their lifespan development. And that’s what we’re really aiming for. So we have active coaches coming into homes to help families with the early years for their children. And we focus on everything from, once again, parenting capabilities to anthropometrics like child growth, to make sure their children are getting a lot of cognitive development, physical stimulation to help them grow appropriately, language interaction, and a lot of play. Plays a big part of the intervention. So that’s currently what we’re working on in Rwanda. We also work in Sierra Leone, we’re currently trying to work with Afghan families who are seeking refuge in America right now.

Rebecca: You’ve talked a little bit about wanting to work directly with people and, of course, teaching is always [LAUGHTER] working directly with people.

Erik: Absolutely.

Rebecca: So your chapter in Picture a Professor is entitled: “Black Man in a Strange Land: Using Principles of Psychology and Behavior Science to Thrive in the Classroom.” Can you tell us a little bit about how you’re using principles of psychology and behavior science to thrive in the classroom?

Erik: Yeah, I sure can. I’d love to open this up for a conversation as well. And you guys can kind of tell me how crazy I am here. When I saw this call for proposals, I thought this was perfect, because to my knowledge, at least to my social and collegial circles, I had never met anyone who was a young black American man teaching in an Australian classroom. And I thought immediately, I have to share my experience because it was just so unique, at least to me, and I don’t know, maybe there are others out there. And if they are, you know, please feel free to reach out to me, I’m sure we can have some great conversations about being in a different country looking different than a traditional… or let’s not say traditional I don’t think that’s quite the right phrasing here… but maybe just what might be considered stereotypical or typical is a common sense of an educator, and trying to connect with students. And the one thing that was really helping carry me through a lot of my experiences, and helping me connect with my students, was my expertise in social and behavioral sciences. Because I knew if we could take some of the principles of evidence-based behavior change techniques, social norms, social identity, and social dynamics, as well as being able to build an empathetic space where we were using humanistic psychology frames or frameworks to understand each other, we could get a lot done together. And the big premise, or the big proposition of the chapter, I’m not going to remove all the intrigue for me to say is that if we treat people like people, and if we take a very humanistic, very compassionate, and very understanding approach to connecting with our students, our pedagogy is going to improve, student outcomes are going to improve all across the board. So the main proposition, the main premise, of what I’m trying to say is, despite maybe not having a lot of similar ground, or similar background, historical context with your students, if you can find certain areas to connect on a psychological or behavioral basis to them, you can improve the experience not only for the students, but also for yourself as an educator.

John: What are some specific techniques that you’ve implemented that rely on behavioral science.

Erik: So, one of my favorites immediately is having a sense of, and it’s a strange word here, but it comes from social identity theory and social identity leadership, that’s called we-ness. And it’s WE hyphenated to N-E-S-S. And it’s the idea of using social identity theory to immediately set group norms and social dynamics that reflect you as being a member of the group and you being able to associate yourself in some way with your students. I think oftentimes, in educational spaces, we almost feel, as educators, we need to separate ourselves, we need to be different, we need to be in charge, we need to be the leaders who can take a distinct role in that classroom, whereas social identity theory says no, you should go in their first day, and you should say, “Well look at all the ways that we’re more alike than different.” And that’s a strong way, not only to make connections with your students, but to open up the floor for your students to be more comfortable coming to you and your students being more comfortable with expressing their needs. And as I mentioned, in my initial work, having that conversation of co-design space, and then being able to identify you as not only a competent leader, but also someone who is going to defend their process and their progress. So that’s absolutely one of my favorite techniques to use right off the bat when you’re starting a semester to say, “Hey, we’re all more alike, we’re all in the same classroom together, we’re all going to be probably very similar in at least our interests. So there’s more things here that connect us than separate us.” I think it’s a powerful lesson for education as a whole.

Rebecca: Do you usually apply this concept as an activity? as a conversation? What does it actually look like in the classroom?

Erik: So there’s a few ways that you can do it and depending on size, I think those massive lecture halls… this can be a little bit difficult, but I think in the small capstone classrooms where you have 20 to 30 students, absolutely, going around and just having a conversation or putting up slides or having an activity where you’re drawing certain topics out of a hat and you have themes of saying “Okay, we’re gonna go talk to three of your classmates for a little while, and educator included, about your family for a little bit or maybe about a certain activity you like and you can use this to start to develop and design a little hierarchy or infrastructure. You’re going to come up with similar themes in almost every classroom, I’d be surprised if these few topics didn’t come up. People have passions and activities outside of the classroom, people have friends and family that they like talking about. And sometimes just having a couple of prompt questions that you can talk about together with your class, if time allows it and if classrooms are small enough to help you have those discussions. It’s just an extremely powerful tool, asking the questions and opening up for your students to share, whether that be slides, whether that be a list of things that you might want to talk about, whether it be asking students what they’d like to learn about and seeing, you know, where you guys kind of connect on that front are things I do first semester. I always give all of myself in that first little lecture of saying, here’s who I am as a person, now, who are you? I like to know who you are too, and whatever students are comfortable with sharing, that’s what you go with. I do those activities as a start always before I get into any topic matter, a sharing not only what I do, but who I am. And then we go from there as developing that sense of we-ness and shared culture right away.

John: Do you encourage students to use commitment devices to help meet their learning objectives for the course?

Erik: Absolutely. So the work of Susan Michie has been very seminal on me. One thing she developed a little while ago, she does a lot of work with trying to codify, categorize, and help us define the different types of behavior change that we can use to help people reach their goals, to help people change their behavior. One thing she developed is called the behavior change technique taxonomy. And I love this thing, because it’s just a list of 83 different devices that you can use to help people develop versions of themselves. And that’s what I’d start with is saying everything I try to do, I try to encourage students to… if they’re not self defining it, at least it has to be halfway have them bring their commitment to the table, because one thing we know about the difference between early childhood development and early child learning and adult learning is the self-directed nature of it and if you’re not taking that self-directed approach, then you’re bound to purge whatever changes or information you’ve just acquired throughout a semester across coursework. So things like social commitment devices and social commitment tools are incredibly useful in helping students help reach their goals. Now, I would provide a caveat here in who they’re making the social commitment to makes a huge difference. And we call this referent groups in social psychology here. And it’s important to know for social identity, it’s important to know for different social norms, if we can talk about a little bit as well, and it’s important to know for social commitment, is who are you making a referent group to, and who you’re making that commitment to? So making the commitment to me, making the commitment to the person you’ve just met, might not actually be the best way to go about it. But saying, hey, for your first assignment, why don’t you go make the social commitment to your best friend, close family member, your partner, and then trying your best to stick to that, is really important. And there are lots of tools you can use with other people externally, to help students reach their goals. And I think the social commitment is a big one. And there’s lots that we can look at into the science of goal setting to help students achieve things and keep themselves on track. Because temporally, it’s really hard. We’re captivated by so many things, currently, especially students, from technology, social media, the race for attention has never been as breakneck as it is now. So thinking about how you can use commitment devices, goal-setting devices, and different types of activities along that front help students stay on track with their goals is crucial to the process of helping students achieve and get to where they want to be. Because at the end of the day, it’s what it’s all about. It’s not about what we need them to get out of lesson plans, it’s about them being able to attain what they’re looking at getting out of their education.

Rebecca: Can you share an example of how you’ve helped students goal set and meet their goals using some of these devices?

Erik: Absolutely. So I think even setting aside time, whether it be assignment time or in-class time, and some of these things seems so simple, but they’re so powerful. I’m sure you’ve heard of things like the SMART goals, or the different types of things. And listen, there’s a whole lot of goal setting typologies and frameworks out there, they all have very similar underlying principles, they’ve just been designed by different people at different stages. And that is their attainable, they’re measurable, they have some degree of specificity intheir time constraints to that regard. The SMART one is the one I tend to use. Now I use two different types of advices. You guys gonna have to bear with me here because it’s actually very powerful in the goal setting space. Now, lots of times we think when we’re setting a goal is visualize, visualize where you want to be in a year and a couple of months and 10 years, what have you. And what the research kind of tells us is those big nebulous goals or the goals that are really far off, they’re really, really great at starting us down a path. So they might be really helpful in helping us choose a major or choose a direction. But one thing they’re not great at is motivating us in the interim, so day to day. So one thing I tend to do with students and I never pushed them on this problem for goal setting, especially… especially across the semester, is actually visualizing what it looks like if we don’t do the day-to-day activity to reach our goal is way more powerful than saying “Okay, well what do I need to do to get to that goal?” And I’ll give you an example here. So sometimes when my students come in I’ll say, “Let’s take five minutes, I’m just gonna give you a quick reflection activity.” Sometimes it’s writing, sometimes it’s just, “I want you to think about it.” And I’ll say, “Let’s think for a little bit what it looks like, if I don’t do what I need to do today to reach my goal, what does my life look like if I don’t take the steps to attain where I want to go?” And I say, “You don’t need to think of absolute doom and gloom or tragedy if you don’t reach here, but using almost a kernel of ‘Oh, no, I really do want that, I do want to do this today because I do want to achieve my goals…’” is a powerful, short term motivator than saying, “Just think of where you want to be in a couple of years, and do you want to do this thing today?” and I was a coach for a long time. I still am, I guess it’s a part of my personality, my identity. And one thing that was always really hard for me is going to practice. And that was kind of like going to class, kind of like showing up to class. And one thing I noticed was when I thought of, “Oh well, you know, if I don’t go to the gym, today, my coach will be disappointed, I’ll miss out on seeing my friends, I might not do as well, later on in my career as an athlete or whatever,” was a lot more motivating for me to go to class every day, or to go and get in that extra workout than me saying, “Oh, I want to be the best in the world at some stage in my life.” So beyond the initial setting of the goals, using any given SMART framework or a couple of step, couple thread framework, having students do very short term, small reflections on things that might help them keep going or maintain without absolutely inducing a sense of dread in them, I find to be really helpful for students. And I haven’t had anyone completely lose it on me yet and say, “You gave me anxiety this semester, having to think about all these things so frequently.” So that’s been helpful.

John: What are some other specific techniques that you’ve used in your classes that are based on behavioral science?

Erik: Oh, there’s a wealth of women, I can go on and on. But some of my favorites have to do with metacognition, and thinking about the higher-order cognitive processes necessary for students to find the justifications they need for motivation. So motivation has always been a really big part of my research, and motivation comes from a lot of different things. So when we’re thinking about reward systems within your brain, I don’t want to say we all know, because I’m sure we’re talking to a very diverse audience. There’s specific reward systems in your brain that offer you certain neural correlates or hormonal biomarkers that are going to reward certain things and start to… we’re not going to say punished for that, I think it’s a weird word. I don’t know why psychology use that… but diminish the activity of other activities. And by reward, it just means it’s reinforcing that behavior so you’re going to do it a little bit more. And so one thing I always like doing is helping students use a metacognitive infrastructure to help self regulate, which sits within the goal setting literature as well, to say, “Well, what do we need to help reward you further in your progression?” For some students, it is strictly grades. But I find that to be a very poor long-term motivator, and you end up the students just kind of being very anxious and very set on just scoring well, which to me never set right as the purpose of learning, of the purpose of turning up to the classroom. So thinking about what positive reinforcement will be necessary for a student to continue going, and you’re never going to be able to define that for a student. But one thing I like to tell everyone who is unfamiliar with the psychological and behavioral sciences is that the carrot is always a way more powerful tool than the stick. The stick is just always more readily available, it’s the easiest to get to, but the carrot is easily the best. If you can find it, it’s a lot more powerful than going to that stick. So I think putting the work in initially is saying, hey, if let’s take the most simple of example of… this probably hasn’t worked on anyone since year two, or year three, but saying, if it takes a pizza party for you guys to really want to be here, if that’s the extrinsic reinforcement I can provide you, I’ll absolutely do it. And for students as they grow older, it usually isn’t that, it has to be something necessarily useful. But finding whatever metacognitive unlocking we need to do for students to think about their own thinking and say, “Why am I here? What is it that I actually want out of this?” And then we can retrofit that and create a little engineering process for each student in or at least small groups of students to say, “Okay, well, maybe it’s not scores this semester, maybe we’ll judge you based on your progress on this particular metric and evaluation,” which I think shifts as well to more… and this is this private bias speaking here…, but psychometrically informed evaluation of students progress than just saying retention of information, knowledge, or learning.

John: How do you encourage students to engage in this metacognitive reflection?

Erik: So there’s an ample amount of literature here from cognitive behavioral techniques and what started as cognitive behavioral therapy not too long ago, but I especially like give a shout out to my former advisor, Professor Matthew Sanders, who said, “Why are we only using cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT for neuroses or things that are going wrong in us? Why can’t we use this to make our lives better and enhance positive outcomes just as much.” So there’s lots of different things we can use, such as reframing of cognition that can help us to unlock or take that next step into the metacognitive space. So let me give you an example that I think will resonate for all of us here, is lots of times people get really nervous about presenting. Presenting is a big one for cognitive restructuring that a lot of people have, because they have a lot of apprehensions or anxieties about presenting. Being able to think about presenting on two fronts here can drastically improve not only your experience with presenting, but your own ability to reflect and improve on how you approach presenting and that’s saying, the anxiety you feel before presentation is the same energy, it’s the same physiological system of excitement for an activity you might have doing something else. So when you can get students to take different perspectives, cognitively, of how they approach things, how they feel when they do certain things, and then have slight cognitive reframes, you are bound or you’re at least on the first step of the path to also behavioral reframing and behavioral restructuring. So perspective shifting, having activities that allow students… it’s something that you gain very early on in your life… but to habit or perspective shift. Allow them to start to play with these cognitive different realms and to start to interrogate their own cognitive biases, their own cognitive perspectives, some of which have been held for, I’m sure, all years of their lives, their whole existence, but being able to exercise that cognitive muscle and perspective taking, cognitive reframing, cognitive restructuring, is the first step to the metacognitive level, where you’re always stopping and saying, “Wait a second, I need to introspect on this a little bit. Am I here because my parents want me to be here, am I here because I want to be here? How does this align with my identity, values.” And in my particular space, we try not to get too reductionistic as to, we don’t need to get specifically to certain brain areas. But being able to have that introspective process of self and how it interacts with the social ecology around you and your historical past is, in my first step you need for metacognitive capability.

John: So specifically, though, do you have them do blogging? Do you have them write journals, or something similar to engage in that? Because left to themselves, students may not always engage in that metacognitive reflection.

Erik: You cannot, [LAUGHTER] absolutely, just leave students, not only students, educators, all of us to our own devices, a big area of my study is on executive functions, which kind of allow us to interact with these metacognitive skills here. And one thing we know about executive functions is it’s the tasks, skills and activities you do in the day to day that really improve them, rather than just saying,” if you think really hard every day, it’ll eventually get there, you’ll break through that ceiling and you’ll be at the highest level of really interacting with your thoughts as you possibly can.” So there’s multiple ways you can do that. One thing I think has been missing… of course, as we know, in the classroom, we do a lot of reading and writing… but even just very simple, and I mean, simple in that, I mean engaging, engaging in fun problem solving within the classroom of coming in and saying, “Hey, this is a difficult thing going on in the world right now or maybe this is a simple thing going on in the world right now… here’s a problem, how would you go about solving it and being able to exercise sub skills of executive functioning, your planning, your monitoring ability, your cognitive temperance, or your ability to restrain or engage based on your own desires and your own will, having activities that help you practice this is really the way to develop your metacognitive ability.” So I think you’re right there, John, in that having students blog regularly, writing is such a powerful tool, and having students just have the conversations, having students trying to inhabit a different experience, it’s kind of seems almost like a mediated pathway to get to higher metacognitive skill. But it’s the only pathway, because there is no direct “Hey, if you just do this task a lot. It’s not quite like coding or like anything else that has a very technical basis, where if you just do the practicing, you’ll get there.” And these are what we call developing expertise by the work of Daniel Kahneman. And so these are softer or a little bit harsher learning environments rather than the very strict ones where if you just go and practice you will eventually improve. So yes, you need a range of different activities that may seem a bit creatively informed to get you to your main goal or your main outcome. But yeah, this is what you can definitely do with students to improve their metacognition. And the metacognition as well as the executive functions tend to be generalizable to other things they’ll do in their lives. So it’s not just what they’re going to be learning in your class, but it will be learning in other classes and then beyond.

Rebecca: One of the things that we talk a lot about on Tea for Teaching is how many faculty aren’t actually prepared in their programs to become teachers. They might not have training as teachers, and then they’re teaching. So if you were to think about this population who maybe doesn’t have a background in behavioral science, in addition to what you’ve already talked about, what are the couple of things that you think all faculty should know about so that they can better support their students and thrive in the classroom.

Erik: This is something that once again really inspired me when I saw this call for proposals is, I completely agree, and I know there’s a lot of demand on us as faculty. There’s so many responsibilities from these days to project management to admin to well beyond just your teaching, but it hurts my soul a little bit here that we end up in these spaces where we’re throwing first-time teachers into the deep end with very minimal assistance of knowing how students learn, how certain underlying principles might be the things that are really driving the retention of knowledge or the acquisition of skills. And what do we know? One of the biggest things I’ve always relied back on when I’ve talked to people about developing skills, especially in the space of teaching and pedagogy is that you’re likely just to role model whatever you imagine initially as being an adequate or maybe above average teacher. So it’s the same thing we see with parents and children, it’s the same thing we see in our social networks, is that we model after the things that we like, that we desire. So I think having a lot of exposure is the first thing we need to know as faculty, to different pedagogical practices and teaching styles because that’s going to give us the most to pick and choose from, and to be able to develop the most evidence-based practices in teaching. Now, the second thing I think I say here always is understanding of fundamental attribution error for your students is a must have across everything. And the fundamental attribution error… sorry, for anyone who is unfamiliar, is your insight, or your cognitive process to look at someone external to you and say, “they are that way, because a personal quality or the way they are, a character disposition,” and say “You’re behaving in a certain way and it might be due to your environmental factors.” And the best way this is described in many literature is, is anyone who’s driving in a car has had that moment where someone cuts them off, or someone does something that looks a little bit silly, and they say: “That person is a terrible driver, I can’t believe they’re doing that.”….where we have no idea where that person was going, we have no idea what state that person might be in, but it’s always a terrible driver. But if we’re to make the same mistake, it’s “I didn’t get enough coffee this morning, I’m just a little bit tired. It was my mistake. But this isn’t reflective of me.” And the same goes for students. When we look at our cohort of students every year, I think this is importantly true in the pandemic, is being able to say there is always a confluence of multiple factors that are cascading and colliding at one time to give you that student in a classroom every day. And you need to take that student as they are rather than expect things that are unrealistic, or are going to be unreliable in the long run, because we demand a lot of our students. So understanding our students where they are and where they’re at on any given day is an important thing we can take from psychological and behavioral sciences. It’s going to improve our experiences and improve our students, rather than demanding or expecting a perfect student out there. And noting that our students operate many different roles, they are pluralities of many different things. So knowing that about our students, I think, is really important in your expectations with how you design your coursework, you go about your class, I think that fundamental attribution error is really important. And then I close out with a third thing here that I think is absolutely crucial. And I think that is shared charter, shared mission, and shared values, which kind of ties us back to our social identity theory here a little bit in saying initially, it’s really important to start a shared charter, shared mission with your students and saying, once again, co-designing and participatory approaches of what do we need out of this? Not what do I need, not what do you need, but having that dialogue with your students is an important part of behavioral design that can help us improve the way we go about our teaching pedagogy. And it’s a really helpful way too if we feel like we don’t have a good understanding of human learning, a good understanding of human behavior. It’s asking students what they want, it’s a great place to start, maybe they don’t know either, but at least we’re getting that feedback from them. And then there’s that investment into the shared mission together. So I think it’s important for a lot of faculty to know who just feel as if they’ve been thrown into open water, and you have this group of people look back at you and relying on you, but you’re not quite sure what’s going to be best for them for the retention of their knowledge and the progression of their careers in education.

John: Would you suggest doing that right at the beginning of the term, and perhaps even jointly shaping the syllabus for the course if that’s possible in your institution?

Erik: It’s a lot of work. That’s a lot of work. But yes, absolutely. And not only that, but I think the monitoring reflection, it’s an important part of all behavioral and psychological sciences, and especially behavioral change is having at least whatever the increment might be. Sometimes it might be pre- to post- to the semester, sometimes it might be every week, but having instances where you touch back in and say, “Hey, is this still working for us?” …and if it’s not, having the ability to make amendments, and being able to encourage new strategies that students can use to help them reorient or re-navigate towards the new goal, because one thing we know we do really, really poorly is make projections about what we want, what we need, in our personal space. So one of my favorite psychological exercises, we ask people, “How different are you going to be in 10 years?” And they go, “Oh, well, I won’t be that different. How much can I change? I know who I am.” But then you ask them, “Are you the same person you were 10 years ago?” and they say, “Oh, no I’m an entirely different person”. And somehow those two things never seem to align. So in that sense, it’s really important that we at least have little markers or flagpoles there that we can stop at and say, “Hey, is this still what we want? I know, we said this in the beginning, but it’s always alright, to make a change, it’s only too late to make a change once the semester is over.” So having the small incremental things, good, but having the baseline start and doing that initially, that’s where the bulk of the legwork should do. And if you can co-create a syllabus, please co-create a syllabus,

Rebecca: I think co-creation is such a wonderful way of existing, but also our institutions are often set up in a way that does not encourage such behavior by requesting syllabi ahead of time, sharing it out, because we want students to know what to expect. There’s all these things that are in place, also with students in mind, but often deters the behavior of co-creation. And some folks may not be at the liberty or feel like they have the ability to do that co-creation work. But I think there’s sometimes ways that we can do this in smaller ways than just a syllabus.

Erik: Smaller ways, absolutely. But Rebecca, you bring up an incredibly crucial point. And I really would like to touch on this because it does underpin and drive it. It’s almost the engine to all the work that I do. We’ve been talking a lot about individual change strategies and things we can encourage students to do. And I have a list of those that is nearly inexhaustible. But the one thing that I think comes to be missing in a lot of this is our focus on systems and the institutional things that sit around us, the foundations that sit around us, that sometimes provide barriers to us as you were saying, Rebecca, being able to make these changes in the way we like to approach our classes. And that’s one thing that in a lot of my work now and in the future I’d like to bring into this space of making changes is: lots of times when it comes to systems change, it’s really about removing obstacles for educators and for students rather than providing new solutions, or “Hey, add this to your syllabus or add that in and it will make your life easier.” Sometimes it’s just about removing the obstacles that make things really difficult for you to make specific changes. And that goes for students and educators alike, when you’re looking at co-creating a syllabi, or being able to engage your students more in the process. I think a lot of times the institutional perspective, or the institutional opinion, is that students, they’re not ready for that, they’re not able to do that. And you’re right, Rebecca, you know, they need to know what to expect. And I think students are way more capable and adept at these things than we think they are, as are faculty, and just saying, “Hey, let’s think about how we can look at the institutional rules that govern and reinforce or impede on certain behaviors, and how might we change these…” because that’s always going to be the best way you can catalyze change, is making changes to your institutional rules, your systems that exists at the higher level or higher order that might be, than actually looking at individuals within that system. Because sometimes you can say, “Hey, we really want this, we really want that.” But if your institutional rules are going to, once again, provide obstacles there, you’re not going to see a lot of changes. And I’ve seen this in everything from my environmental work to helping families out is, without the actual adjustment to the system as you’re trying to make adjustments to households, the classrooms, you’re just not going to see it happen. So these things have to be done in tandem. And I’m so happy you brought up that point.

John: One of our guests on a past podcast, and I’m not sure which one… I can think of three or four who might have said this… [LAUGHTER] is that they do have the official syllabus which is shared with the department, administration, and so forth. But then there’s the actual syllabus which is shared with the students and updated as they go. And that might be a good compromise, where there’s a core of content or a core of learning objectives and so forth that are in the official syllabus. But then you may have something that’s a bit more flexible and adaptable to the students that are actually in your class.

Rebecca: I mean, I submitted a syllabus that reflects a moment in time, it’s got a date on it, and then it’s a Google doc, a living document. Things change. Disasters happen. We get confused about something we need more time on it.

Erik: Sure. And I think having that space to make those changes and saying it doesn’t have to be a perfect syllabus is ideal. And one thing I talk a lot about in my work is behavioral inertia, where we’re going is kind of how the ball continues to roll. And it’s always really hard to knock us off of that behavioral inertia of what we’re currently doing. And we have stuff like this in our life. Maybe we have a certain policy or a plan or something and we see a better policy and a better plan, but we’ve had this policy and plan for 10 years. How much work would it be to actually change it? How much will it actually save me? And the same goes for our syllabi or our students in that we can get stuck in our ways. But as you’re both saying here, having the small compromises and just making incremental change, you don’t have to go scorched earth every time and say, let’s throw out every syllabus and just start from scratch every semester. But hey, this has been working okay. And having that living document you can make small adjustments to, this works for a semester three years ago, but it’s not working now. So let’s make a change to this particular section, for this particular activity and changes stuff. So just having those little things where our goals feel attainable, and we’re taking them in small enough… it’s called goal slicing… small enough slices that we can actually achieve them rather than trying to make it feel like a monumental have to move the heavens to get this done. I think it’s really, really important. So I’m glad you both brought that up, kind of looking for the solutions here that I think are really important and incredibly vital for us slowly making progress toward where we want to go.

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

Erik: Yeah, what’s next? I think this is a great question, I see a field where I say there’s so much to be done. I have always been absolutely engrossed by an understanding of pedagogy. I’ve always really desired to know how I can improve performance as an educator. And the one thing I think that’s really important right now is looking at how we can infuse different practices for mentorship and coaching sciences into our ability for faculty and teaching professionals here. And so that’s where I see us going next. I always like having focus on students because students are why we do what we do. But I think to improve the students, once again, we’re going to talk about a little bit of a mediated pathway here, is going from a focus on what do the students need to do to what do we need to do as teaching professionals and faculty to make sure we’re adequately and sufficiently prepared to enter that classroom. So what I’d really like to improve on is use the same mechanisms of social psychological behavioral sciences to help improve your pedagogical ability, teaching professionals, and this is kind of what I’ve said in a lot of the parenting work I’ve worked on in the past is if we want better outcomes for the kids, we probably shouldn’t be going to the kids directly, because they don’t have a lot of control over what’s happening, especially when they’re really little. We really need to be going to the parents and improving the parents. And same thing goes here, as we can use evidence-based behavior change principles, techniques, and tactics, complex interventions, to help improve our ability as faculty members and teaching professionals. So we’re not just throwing educators off the deep end and say, “Hey, you’ve never taught before, but here you go.” So that’s what I see as being the next step in evolution to improving pedagogy as us in education as a whole.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us, Erik, and sharing some science with us today, as well as some nice teases for your chapter in Picture a Professor.

Erik: Thank you both. That was a lot of fun.

John: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

103. Commitment Devices

Students, and faculty, generally have good intentions when planning to work toward long-run objectives. It’s always easier, though, to start those projects tomorrow instead of today. In this episode, Dr. Dean Karlan joins us to discuss how commitment devices may be used to align our short-term incentives with our long-run goals.

Dean is a Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University, Co-Director of the Global Poverty Research Lab at the Kellogg School of Management, President and Founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, co-founder of Stickk.com and Impact Matters, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dean is the author of many scholarly articles and several books related to economics, including my favorite introductory economics textbook.

Show Notes

  • Dean Karlan
  • Innovations for Poverty Action
  • Stickk.com
  • Impact Matters
  • Global Policy Research Lab – at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern
  • University
  • Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab
  • Karlan, Dean and Jonathan Morduch (2018). Economics. McGraw-Hill.
  • Giné, X., Karlan, D., & Zinman, J. (2010). Put your money where your butt is: a commitment contract for smoking cessation. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2(4), 213-35.
  • McGuire, S. Y. (2015). Teach students how to learn: Strategies you can incorporate into any course to improve student metacognition, study skills, and motivation. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
  • Momentum – the app for targeted giving that Dean mentioned
  • The following study, referenced in the podcast, examines the problem of suboptimal fertilizer use of fertilizer in Kenya. Both were just cited in the Nobel statement on the 2019 award to Abhijit Bannerjee, Esther Dulfo, and Michael Kremer. Bannerjee, Duflo, and Kremer were Dean’s professors at MIT. Bannerjee and Duflo were on this thesis committee. (The Nobel announcement came after the podcast was recorded but two days before its release.)
    • Duflo, E., Kremer, M., & Robinson, J. (2011). Nudging farmers to use fertilizer: Theory and experimental evidence from Kenya. American Economic Review, 101(6), 2350-90.
  • Artz, Benjamin and Johnson, Marianne and Robson, Denise and Taengnoi, Sarinda, Note-Taking in the Digital Age: Evidence from Classroom Random Control Trials (September 13, 2017) – the study about note-taking that John mentioned.

Transcript

John: Students, and faculty, generally have good intentions when planning to work
toward long-run objectives. It’s always easier, though, to start those projects tomorrow instead of today. In
this episode, we examine how commitment devices may be used to align our short-term incentives with our long-run
goals.

[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’s guest is Dr. Dean Karlan. Dean is a Professor of Economics and Finance
at Northwestern University, Co-Director of the Global Poverty Research Lab at the Kellogg School of Management,
President and Founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, co-founder of Stickk.com and Impact Matters, and a
member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dean is the author of many scholarly articles and several books related
to economics, including my favorite introductory economics textbook. Welcome, Dean.

Dean: Thank you. Thanks for having me here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Dean: A vanilla expresso. I’ve said it as “expresso” for the sake of our mutual
friend Matthew. [LAUGHTER] So we can show this to him and he will be very upset. [LAUGHTER]

John: …and I am drinking Bing Cherry black tea.

Rebecca: …and I have the Sally Lunn… Disclaimer: I’m not sure if that’s how you
say it… house blend tea from the UK. [LAUGHTER]

John: We invited here primarily to talk about some of the work you’ve done related
to behavioral economics. We know that students learn more when they engage in spaced practice, yet students tend
to procrastinate, as do most faculty. So we want to talk to you a little bit about why people tend to focus on
immediate gratification at the expense of long-run goals.

Dean: So, you know, the heart of it is human nature to some extent. And I think the
thing to realize, though, is that it’s not a universal truth, right? There’s many situations, and many people
who are more patient than others… that are patient in one domain, not in another. There’s a general sense, of
course, that we value things more today than we do tomorrow. This is kind of at the heart of economics, but a
lot of the issues that we’re doing research on, and some of the active policies that we’re working on, aren’t so
much about whether people are patient or not. It’s about whether they succumb to temptation, and there is a
difference. And the difference is this. When we talk about succumbing to temptation, what we’re saying is, if
you ask me what I want to do in a month, I tell you, I want to eat healthfully. I want to exercise. I want to
train for a marathon. And then when a month comes, and now a month from now is now today, and you say, what are
you doing today? And I go, “Oh, yeah, that chocolate cake looks really good. [LAUGHTER] And I ran out of time,
I’m not going to go to the gym today.” And I go, “I’m too tired. I prefer to go to the movies. And that
marathon? Yeah, kind of cold. I guess I kind of knew that a month ago. But I was out of mind. And so I’ll train
for that later.” And so the point is, my preferences change. And that’s something that economists historically
did not handle very well, this idea of preferences changing. And yet that is what behavioral economics has
done… is basically trying to build better models that take into account that reality of preferences
changing… and whether we call it preference and changing or not, is kind of a technical jargon thing. But the
basic idea that you can say you want A over B in a month, and then when a month comes, you say actually I prefer
B over A. And that’s a fundamental change in a lot of the ways that economists were thinking about things and
this applies in many domains. And the reality is, I might be really well disciplined when it comes to spending
money on one thing, for instance, like clothing, I have like almost zero temptations on clothing. But yet for
peanut M&Ms, I have a real big problem. [LAUGHTER] And I know there’s lots of people that are exactly the other
way around, right? And so it’s not something that we can attribute to someone as an individual characteristic
and saying, “You succumb to temptations, and you don’t.” Everybody has their different areas where they’re
strong, and they’re weak.

Rebecca: So when we want to accomplish something in our academic field, or we want
our students to accomplish something in what they’re studying, how do we get them to not succumb to that
temptation of doing the thing that seems immediately desirable.

Dean: So I think the absolute single most important thing is to help someone become
self aware. Once you do that, then there’s a few different paths that might work. And people are different. So
that path might be different. But the first step, that in most situations, is important for that kind of
weakness is to help people become self aware. And by self aware, I mean aware of the fact that if they don’t
change something about their environment, that they’re on a certain path, and they’re likely to engage in that
temptation behavior, and even though they say now they don’t want to do it, if they don’t change something or do
something different, they’re more likely to do it. And so what is that path that they could go down? Well, one
example, which is what you mentioned earlier, Stickk.com, which is a website that I started, that allows people
to write commitment contracts. So if I want to, let’s put it in the school work or the work context, suppose I
have a partnership with a co-author, and I am being derelict in my duty to write the introduction, we agreed I’m
supposed to take first stab at, and every week there’s something else comes up and I don’t get to it. So I go on
Stickk and I write a contract to my friend, my co-author, and I say if I don’t deliver it to you by next Friday,
I owe you $500. It’s still not a perfect contract, right? I mean, I could hand them a piece of crap that’s not a
very well written document, and he could say, “This isn’t good.” So there’s lots of wiggle room there, but there
has to be some level of trust with my collaborator… it’s a contract that the collaborator can call me out on
and say, “Look, we both know this is not what you said you would do,” so you still need some element of trust in
that agreement to make that work. But that’s the kind of thing you can do. And by making that concrete plan and
actually making it even more costly, beyond just continued shame, and scathing emails from your friends, it
makes you more likely to engage in the behavior you say you want to engage in. The punch line we use is it
increases the price of vice. Whatever your vice is, it’s a way of increasing that price.

John: So the goal is basically to align the short-term incentives with the long-run
goals.

Dean: That’s exactly right, to make it so that the prices you’re facing now are
aligned, are going to drive you to the behavior that you say in the long run you want to engage in.

John: So you’re changing the costs or benefits of the activity immediately through
some mechanisms such as Stickk.com.

Dean: Exactly. And of course, you know, I could write a contract with you just on
the side… just by emails and say, “Hey, if I don’t do X, I owe you Y. So, Stickk is a vehicle for making it
easy for people to do this. One of the popular options on Stickk is actually where I don’t give money to you,
but I give money to a charity that I hate. This might work really well if we disagreed on some political issue,
which I doubt we do. But I suspect over the years, we’ve talked about things we would have identified some
disagreement if we had one [LAUGHTER] that was stark enough on the extremes. But if we did, it would work out
really well. Because I could say, “Hey, I’ll send money to the charity on the other side of the political
spectrum, which you like, and I hate, and then you’re happy to enforce that. [LAUGHTER]

John: So anti-charities seem to be really effective.

Dean: Yes.

John: For example, I think you recommend for liberals, I haven’t checked recently,
but for liberals, you recommend the NRA or a Republican super PAC. And for Republicans. I think you recommended
the ACLU or a Democrat super PAC.

Dean: That’s exactly right. And we also have gun control, abortion, gay rights, and
super PACs on the two sides… and for the religious people in England, we offer up different football teams
[LAUGHTER] so you can support Arsenal or Chelsea or Fulham, and the money goes off to the team that you hate in
England.

John: What types of commitments do people make on Stickk.com.?

Dean: The single most common, it shouldn’t be a surprise, which is weight loss. I
mean, that is the biggest issue where this is highly relevant where everybody can think of someone who says they
want to lose weight, and somehow doesn’t do it. And every day, it’s like “Tomorrow I’ll do it.” Smoking
cessation is another very common one. And we have seen several randomized trials done not via the Stickk
website, but outside, but with the same exact contract structure that show that it became very effective for
helping people stop smoking if they agree to sign up for this contract. So smoking cessation is common…
exercise is common. There’s also a very large set of interesting contracts that people come up with on their
own, that are everything from dating… to marital relations… to work… to getting work done… So, flossing
your teeth…. Speaking more slowly to foreigners in New York City was one of my favorites. Another one of
my favorites just said “I will not date any more losers.” And the punch line that I really liked in particular
was that this person named a friend as the referee. The website allows you to name a friend who gets to
adjudicate whether you succeed or fail. So this person said that I will not date anymore losers, and Susie gets
to decide if any of my dates are losers or not. That was awesome. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Have you seen good success with people using Stickk.com?

Dean: Yes. But as a social scientist, I want to caution my “Yes.” So it’s very
pleasing to get emails… and I do get them fairly periodically from people telling me some story about
Stickk or I meet someone and they told me about how they used it to achieve a goal and wasn’t this great. And
that makes me very happy. In the back of my mind, as a social scientist, I’m always like, “Well, that’s great.
But did we cause that to happen? Or were you just the kind of person who was going to achieve that goal anyhow
and you used Stickk as your vehicle, but had Stickk not existed, you would have found some other way? Because
you were just a really driven person dedicated to overcoming your temptation problem. Now, that’s the whole
reason why we do run randomized trials, because we want to know, did we cause that to happen or are we just the
stepping stone along the path that was going to be taken anyhow. And there have been randomized trials done on
commitment contracts. And we do find very strong consistent evidence that for those who signed up, it is a very
strong tool that does lead to behavior change that would not otherwise happen. Having said that, take an example
of a study I did in the Philippines on smoking cessation doing a contract that was almost exactly like Stickk.
The difference was the money, if they failed, went to a local orphanage. It didn’t go to a charity they hate.
And there, we had a very large effect on likelihood of stopping smoking… about a 30 percentage point shift in
the likelihood they stopped. That’s a big, big treatment effect. But only one out of nine people said “Yes” to
opening the contract. Eight out of nine said, “Huh? Yeah, I know I told you I want to stop smoking. But I guess
I don’t really want to stop that badly… or I don’t think I can and so I’m not going to sign this contract
because I think that’ll just end up costing me money. And I’ll still spend money on cigarettes. And so I won’t
sign the contract.” So, eight of nine did not… but one out of nine did. And the idea was that they were taking
money they were spending on their cigarettes, and instead they’re putting in an account. So even if they kind of
stopped smoking some and went back, we don’t think of that as a bad thing even if they lose the money, because
they did smoke fewer cigarettes in the meanwhile… failed to stop… So it didn’t work. But they did smoke less
and the charity got some money. So one of the things that this makes me realize that goes back to the question
you asked earlier, which is helping people be self aware. How do you move the needle on that one out of nine?
Why is it only one out of nine? Is it that people don’t realize that if they don’t do something like this,
they’re going to probably just continue smoking, and they need to engage in some sort of change in their
environment? Change in the prices they face? Change in some peer influence? Change in something to help them
stop smoking… That it’s not going to just happen because they wake up one day and decide to do it.

John: You mentioned randomized controlled experiments. And I know that’s one of the
things you’ve done extensively with IPA (Innovations for Poverty Action). One of the things I’ve noticed in much
of the research in teaching and learning is often people do an intervention and they look at how it works for
the students who actually use that intervention, but they don’t get evidence on the counterfactual. So, you
don’t know how it would have worked in the absence of that intervention. So how might, perhaps, we think about
doing more randomized controlled experiments in educational research.

Dean: So I think there’s a lot of settings in which one can do them in education.
They do need large classrooms, or multiple classrooms or collaboration across universities in order to have a
sufficient sample size, but there’s lots of ways that one could do it. I’ll give you an example. We have a
Principles of Economics textbook that you mentioned earlier. And our theme very much in this book is kind of two
prong: one is it’s a very much a theme about economics is a good thing… that if you use it can help you
actually improve your own life and also help improve public policies. We’re trying to get away from this bad
image of being a dismal science and instead point out that economics really can be a path towards better lives.
But the other part is trying to be very grounded in empirical analysis and examples that are real, that provide
data and a crisp understanding of how these economic theories actually play out in real life. And one of the
things that we wanted to do in this is trying to understand, “Well, does reading the book help learning?” Kind
of a dangerous question for us to ask… a little scared… We haven’t done this yet, but we started a pilot of
it, where we wanted to get professors at different universities who are using the book to basically offer
students a little bit of like a raffle, where there’s a quiz that’s online that we can organize at the end of
the chapter. That’s where students have a bit of an incentive to read those chapters. And we can randomize which
students in which week get that incentive and they’re told, read chapter four, and go online, and there’s going
to be 10 questions on this website that the authors of the book set up and you just answer those 10 questions.
And if you answer them correctly, or eight out of 10 or something like this, then you get entered into a raffle
for an Amazon gift card. And what this allows us to do, because of all the electronic homework and problem sets
and things of this nature, is actually run a test of whether, assuming that that prize leads to an increase in
reading of the actual textbook, we can actually see the impact of reading the textbook on test outcomes. And so
this is an example of the kind of research that one can do. Why might we do this? Because imagine instead within
the alternative, which is just to take a final exam, and ask people ahead of the final exam, “Hey, by the way,
we just want to know who really read the book and who didn’t.” Suppose we got a list.. …we got, you know,
two-thirds of the class read it, one-third did not… and then we looked at the grades, and we said “Ah,
the two thirds of the class that read the book did better on the final exams and one-third did not…” That
would be a really bad analysis, that would be a really horrible thing to conclude and say, “Aha, that’s our
book, causing that change to happen, and improve test scores…” because anybody who was reasonable would look
at us and say, “Well, wait a second, the two-thirds that read the book, they sound like better students. They’re
more diligent, they’re more disciplined, they do their assignments, and so they probably just studied harder in
general and invested more time in the course. They maybe even went to the lectures when the other third didn’t
even bother going to lectures, all sorts of things are different.” And so you cannot just look at the difference
in test scores and say that’s caused by reading the book. And so that’s why we set up randomized trials in that
way, is to try to get at the causality question, not the correlation question.

Rebecca: So do you have any research or advice about motivating the students who
wouldn’t be those one of nine to sign a contract in the first place… to actually get them to commit to doing
better? Have you done any research in that area to think about that?

Dean: For it’s worth, we’re actually in the middle of setting up studies on this and
part of the idea is a little bit of a two stage process: let it play out a little bit without and see whether
they succeed or fail, ask people to make predictions upfront: “Will you succeed or fail?” Ask them upfront
say, “You know what? If you don’t succeed, how about in the future writing and commitment contract?” Because a
lot of people might say, “I don’t need to do a commitment contract, I’ll do it.” And then you say, “Okay, but
just in case, though… just in case. How about in a month, if you haven’t done it, then do a contract?”
They’ll go “Yeah, fine…. that’s fine, because I’ll do it. So it’s okay.” And then a month comes, and they
haven’t done it ad then you go: “You remember that thing you said… a month ago… you said you’d do it. You
didn’t. But you said If you didn’t do it, you’d write a contract. So here we are. [LAUGHTER] You want to do the
contract?” So we’re actually testing that out in a couple different domains to see if that’s a good way of
helping people become self aware. And it might be actually a really nice way of doing it. Because some people
will actually succeed in that first month. That’s good, that’s great. We want that. But we want to be there to
kind of clean up afterwards and pick up and help the people that are not able to achieve that goal.

John: One of the things we’re doing on our campus this semester is we have a reading
group of Saundra McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn. And one of the things she suggests is that very sort of
intervention, that the best time to encourage students to commit to trying new strategies is after they’ve tried
their existing strategies, and they’ve been unsuccessful. So they’re primed to at least consider it.

Dean: That sounds great. I agree.

John: You talked a little bit about stick calm. Are there other types of commitment
devices that students might use to encourage behavior consistent with their long-run objectives.

Dean: So I think there are some in the social side. As an example, there’s studying
is the obvious… that we talked about, but there’s a lot of things that are the kinds of things that we all say
we want to do. But when the time comes, maybe is time consuming, or costly, like donating money to charity.
Right? There might be some cause… call it climate change… call it poverty in developing
countries… call it poverty in America, whatever the case is, and it’s something that is troubling to us.
Something that we feel like even if we contribute a little bit… it’s important, we can contribute a
little bit. That little bit can make a difference. And we want to be a part of that. But yet, when it comes time
at the end of the month, or worse yet, at the end of the year, when a lot of people do think about writing
checks and providing support to charities, they’re left with whatever is in their bank account. And why is less
in than their bank account than they expected? Well, let’s go back to the earlier conversation. Because they
were in a mall, and that shirt looked interesting, and they went out to one more dinner than they had planned to
in their budget, or they were at dinner and they had one more Margarita than they had planned to. These things
slip through, and they’re never thought about when you’re thinking about your overall budget and the end of the
month comes and you don’t have the money… or the end of the year comes and the money’s not there… And the
idea is, again, thinking about well, “What proportion of income do you want to be spending on charitable goods
and supporting other people and helping align those things you say you care about with your actual behavior of
what you’re actually doing with your money after paying for the things you really, really need, like rent and
electricity. So there are various tools for trying to do that… locking in automatic payments every month,
for instance, so that it just happens automatically. There’s a new app that I’m helping to do research with them
to help figure out how to promote called Momentum, which tags giving towards behaviors in your life or behaviors
in other people’s lives. So you can say everything I go to Starbucks, I want to donate 10% of my spending at
Starbucks to clean water in developing countries. Or you can say every time I buy clothing, I want to send money
to a homeless shelter in America. Or you can tack things to other people’s behavior. Every time Trump tweets, I
want to send money to the ACLU… [LAUGHTER]

John: That could get really expensive.

Dean: Well, you control how much. [LAUGHTER] …and It can do things on both sides
of the political spectrum. That’s just one example.

John: That discussion reminds me of a study I think you were involved… a
study on fertilizer and Sub-Saharan Africa?

Dean: Yes, this is research that was conducted under the umbrella of Innovations for
Poverty Action, but it’s not my personal research. And it was a striking example of how these issues of
temptation in financial management and planning for the future versus dealing with things today. This is germane
to people, whether they’re rich or poor. And in the case of using fertilizer, this is one of those cases where
if you go to most for farmers low income farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, most farmers do know that using more
fertilizer is better for them in the long run in terms of them earning more money. But if you go at planting
season when they need the fertilizer and you say, “Well, why aren’t using fertilizer?” The most common answer is
not that I don’t know to do it, but just that “Well, I ran out of money, cuz I just had three or four months of
the hungry season where I used up all my money.” And so what the researchers did is went to them at harvest when
they’re flush with cash and said, “Would you like to buy a voucher now, that is good for some fertilizer, and
you just come back in three months, and you use the voucher to get you fertilizer? And by the way, if you change
your mind, you feel free, you can cash this voucher back in for cash.” So it’s not actually a very strong
commitment. And farmers said, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.” …and sol they did that. And then
fertilizer use went way up.

John: So the notion is pre-committing to things and locking that in somehow becomes
the new status quo, and then it forces that change in behavior, it makes it more likely that you’ll persist with
that change in behavior.

Dean: Exactly right. And one of the other lessons we learned is that soft
commitments are usually probably better at than hard ones. If it’s too binding, it goes back to we talked about
earlier… if it’s too hard of a commitment, then people might be reluctant to agree to the commitment in the
first place. So you need for to be a little bit of wiggle room and some trust with whoever’s on the other side
of that commitment to say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. The circumstances are a bit tough. That’s okay. Don’t
worry about it.” Depending on who you’re doing this contract with and what the context is, you do need that kind
of wiggle room usually, for reasonable exceptions to apply.

John: And you mentioned the social aspect of it. One thing I was thinking when you
mentioned that was that I know some people who made commitments to go to a gym regularly. And then if one of
them didn’t show up, say Rebecca, the others would post a picture on Facebook saying “We’re all here. Where are
you?”

Dean: That’s awesome.

John: Can students perhaps sometimes leverage peer pressure to encourage behavior
consistent with their long-run goals?

Rebecca: Let’s note that when they backed off on that, I stopped going to the gym.
[LAUGHTER]

Dean: That is absolutely a hundred percent consistent and actually, thank you for
bringing this up. Because I should have said this earlier. When I say “increase the price of vice,” that doesn’t
necessarily mean cash price. That’s a good example of increasing the social price, the social cost of failing to
go to the gym. It’s a different form of payment, so to speak, is reputation and peer influence. But it’s very
much exactly in the heart of what we mean. And a lot of people in the Stickk website actually do not put money
at stake. They do put their reputation, they name a referee, and supporters who get informed whether they
succeed or fail. And that’s it, there’s no money. And we still get thank you emails from people about how it
helped them. You’ve got to know your type, and maybe that’s going to drive you more than 100 bucks. And so do
that instead of 100 bucks… .or both.

Rebecca: Just going back to the fertilizer example and I’m wondering if you could
set up something very similar in a classroom where students commit to something early on that has a little bit
of wiggle room to it, but might actually get them to follow through by the end of the semester.

Dean: There have been studies on things of this nature, getting students to give
them flexibility for when to do assignments versus getting them to commit to when their assignments are… and
when students are committed to when the assignments are rather than giving them flexibility,. performance tends
to be better.

John: And it doesn’t matter whether the commitments are imposed by the instructor or
whether they were self imposed. As long as there are deadlines with a penalty, students tend to do things. And I
think that’s true for us too… that if we have an abstract that needs to be submitted for a conference, I
suspect there’s a lot of them submitted right before that midnight deadline. So deadlines can be helpful, I
think, too.

Rebecca: I know I don’t do anything unless it has a deadline. [LAUGHTER]

John: I have deadlines every day.

Dean: I remember being told by a few different admissions panels in a few different
instances that you can definitely see, if you look at the likelihood of acceptance…. you see a strong
correlation between submitting the application early and last minute. These are two kind of difficult to get
into schools. And if you look at people who submitted a week to a month early, before the deadline… that’s not
a factor that’s used in decision making… but they do end up with a higher likelihood of getting admitted…
that these are students that have their act together… have everything in order and are stronger students
overall than students who submit at the last minute. So it’s not saying submit early and you increase your odds
of getting it. Just to be clear, this is not a causal mechanism, this is a correlation. [LAUGHTER]

John: That reminds me of another study we referred to. I don’t remember the exact
citation, but there had been all these studies (and we’ve talked about this in an earlier podcast)… there had
been a lot of studies suggesting that students who took notes by hand did better than students who took notes on
a computer or mobile device. And there was a randomized controlled experiment done maybe a year and a half or so
ago, where half the class used computers for half of the class. the other half took notes by hand, and they
found there was no significant difference depending on how any individual student took the notes. The difference
was, those students who chose to take notes by hand generally tended to be more successful, no matter what way
in which they took their notes. So it’s that self-selection issue that we see in a lot of these studies that can
be problematic in interpreting the results.

We always end our podcast by asking what’s next?

Dean: What’s next for us is coming October/November, we’re going to be releasing
over 1000 ratings of charities in America at Impact Matters, which is the other charity which I started, which
you mentioned briefly. Impact Matters is providing guidance to donors to help them choose good charities,
because there’s sadly no real good venue for doing this en masse right now. There’s way too many groups that are
focused strictly on accounting data and accounting data can be very, very misleading. But we are focused on what
matters: impact. Hence, our name: Impact Matters. And we’re going to be releasing 1000 ratings October/November.
I don’t know when the podcast comes out, but it comes up before then, great. Help us get this out there. We also
want to form student groups that help communicate and learn from what we’re doing so they can understand what do
we mean by impact. So it’s something that we want to form student groups on campuses about. So please do reach
out if you have any interest in getting involved or getting students involved

John: We’ll include a link to that in the show notes as well as contact information.

Dean: Awesome.

John: Thank you, Dean. It’s always a pleasure.

Rebecca: Thanks so much.

Dean: Thank you both. It’s great to talk to you.

[MUSIC]

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

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