Category: diversity

382. The Demographic Cliff

Posted in diversity, equity, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, teaching, Uncategorized
February 26, 2025

The number of high school graduates in the U.S. is expected to decline for several years. In this episode, Peter Ghazarian joins us to discuss the experiences of higher ed institutions in Korea and Japan, which have recently experienced similar reductions in college enrollments. Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. He has worked in international education in the US, UK, Germany, and Korea. Peter’s work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy, multiculturalism, and human migration. He is the author of a very recent article on higher education and an aging population in the U.S.

Show Notes

  • Ghazarian, P. G., Bhandari, B., & Chen, S. (2023). ” It can be chaos here”: International Student Experiences of US Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education, 15(1). 33-34.
  • Ghazarian, P. G. (2025). Higher education and an aging population in the USA: learning from the experiences of Korea and Japan. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 1-7.
  • Grawe, N. D. (2018). Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. United States: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • School of Ocean Futures, Arizona State University

Transcript

John: The number of high school graduates in the U.S. is expected to decline for several years. In this episode, we discuss the experiences of higher ed institutions in Korea and Japan, which have recently experienced similar reductions in college enrollments.

[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 Peter Ghazarian. Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. He has worked in international education in the US, UK, Germany, and Korea. Peter’s work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy, multiculturalism, and human migration. He is the author of a very recent article on higher education and an aging population in the U.S. Welcome back, Peter.

Peter: I’m very glad to be here. Thank you.

John: Today’s teas are… Peter? Are you drinking tea?

Peter: I am drinking tea. I’ve got a spearmint tea here

Rebecca: That sounds nice and refreshing. I have a Lady Grey today, John.

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

Peter: I love a good ginger tea. I’m always in favor of that.

Rebecca: We invited you here today, Peter, to discuss your article, “Higher education and an aging population in the USA: learning from the experiences of Korea and Japan,” which was first published on January 5 of this year. Fertility rates have been declining in all the industrialized nations, and the number of high school graduates is expected to reach a peak in 2025 followed by a gradual decline. Have some US regions already been experiencing this decline in college-age populations in response to internal migration patterns?

Peter: Yes. So we hear all the time about this demographic cliff that’s coming, that’s going to have a profound impact on higher education in the United States. And for quite a bit of time, I just felt like it may just be scare mongering, because I hadn’t really looked at the data directly myself, and it almost seemed as though it might just be an excuse for structural change in higher education, a way to justify changes people already wanted. But then I decided to dig a little bit deeper, and I saw that there is some pretty profound change coming, especially in particular regions of the US. So in the northeast and in the midwest in particular, we’re seeing a lot of internal migration to the south and to the west, and a lot of urbanization that is kind of hollowing out rural areas that play host to a lot of these smaller, tuition-dependent higher education institutions that really put them in a vulnerable position.

John: So, in this study, you’re comparing the US experience with that of Korea and Japan. Could you talk about why you selected Korea and Japan as a basis for comparison?

Peter: Sure, absolutely. So there were really two major reasons why I decided to go with Korea and Japan. One is that they’ve already experienced this phenomenon. It’s been going on there already, and so it’s an opportunity to kind of peek into the future of what it might look like further down along the line, and the types of things we might want to prepare for before this is upon us. And then the other reason is just because I spent so much time there, a good 7, 8, 9 years in Korea working in higher education, and I realized that a lot of the things I was hearing here kind of echoed what I was hearing at faculty meetings and in press releases at my former institutions, since it kind of tickled something inside me like, wait a minute, I’ve heard this before, and it inspired me to go and look back at exactly what had been going on.

Rebecca: You kind of mentioned that Korea and Japan have been dealing with these issues for a bit of time. What was their experience like? Were those institutions closing? merging?

Peter: Well, I mean, they’re still dealing with it now. They haven’t really solved the issue of a very low birth rate, and the impact that it’s had on higher education has primarily been a push towards mergers, and that, I think, has been facilitated by a number of environmental characteristics in those places that is helpful and conducive to the merger of higher education institutions, just because they’re much more dense in terms of the population distribution. There isn’t nearly as much land as there is here, and very large populations, and so even with population decline or population aging in certain areas, there’s still a relatively large number of people within a certain range around particular institutions. And so mergers become much more feasible, because if there isn’t enough to support two institutions, if we bring them together and make one, we should be able to get by. And so, yeah, I would say mergers by far have been the most common response in both Korea and Japan. Though Korea has had its fair share of closures as well.

John: In your paper, you talk a little bit about the types of mergers that were occurring in Korea and Japan. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Peter: Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that there were some characteristics that help to allow these mergers to go forward, and one of them is some of the patterns that we see in ownership of the higher education institutions in Korea and Japan, because there was such a boom in higher education not so long ago, like in the past 50 years, a lot of these institutions are actually owned by similar groups or similar individuals or families, and so they would successfully establish a four-year institution and then want to open a polytechnic or a trade school of some kind, or what we would call a community college, but there would be called a junior college, and that made it very easy. If the same group of people own both institutions and they realize both are struggling, well, we’ll cut out some of the overhead costs by merging these together. And there was also some policies in place from the government that sort of pushed these institutions to do this as well, because the governments in both Korea and Japan wanted to preserve a certain amount of stability in their higher education systems to prevent what people might perceive as collapse, and so there was a kind of gradual, gentle pressure to merge institutions over time that seemed to be helpful towards getting this done.

Rebecca: So what are some of the factors that affected the likelihood of institutions in Korea or Japan to survive these demographic shifts?

Peter: I would say that the major sort of elements that played into whether or not an institution could survive were: their location, rural institutions were particularly vulnerable; their size, smaller institutions struggled more; and then their focus, comprehensive four-year institutions tended to fare better unless they were both rural and very small, those institutions were very vulnerable. It was like a combination of those things. If you were rural and remote, you’re in trouble. If you’re rural and very small, you’re in trouble. The other was the focus, four-year institutions tended to be all right. They tended to do okay, because what we started to see in Korea and Japan is that as there were fewer and fewer people applying for admission, it was easier to get a position at a four-year institution, and that a lot of these two-year institutions were almost overflow in the past, where they would take on students who had wanted to go to a four-year institution but weren’t able to get admission, and so they settled for a two-year option before moving into the workforce. But now, because there weren’t as many students applying, institutions were more willing to take on these students who otherwise may have gone to a two-year institution, which left two-year institutions really struggling to get a sufficient number of students to be able to support themselves.

John: And as you noted with internal migration decisions in the US, with people moving to the south and west and moving away from rural areas, we’re already seeing some colleges being hit. What are some of the ways in which US colleges have dealt with this, or perhaps failed to deal with this?

Peter: I would say that the institutions tend to take three different sort of outlooks to this issue or this problem of demographic cliff that they see coming. Some institutions are trying to really cut back to reduce costs, and they use it to justify changes they make at their institutions, which can be unsettling to faculty. I’ve seen, for example, programs merge or programs close where even tenured faculty have lost their positions as a result of this sort of hard-nosed approach that’s being adopted by some administrations, and then it’s justified through the need for cost cutting in anticipation of these changes that are going to be coming to the institution. Another approach is a sort of like plug your ears and whistle. Some institutions have just really been kind of hoping for the best in the long run, and this might have an impact on others, but it’s not going to have an impact on us, and they’re just kind of going forward with business as usual. And if the reputation of the institution is strong enough, then they are likely to come out all right in the end, because while there might be some displacement in terms of who had gone there before and who goes there now, in the end, their situation isn’t going to change that much from what they’ve experienced in the past. And so it’s understandable why they would kind of take this sort of rose colored glasses approach to the situation. And then finally, we’re starting to see some institutions who realize that they’re going to need to change, but they’re not exactly sure how. And so they’re kind of preparing themselves to be able to change. They’re communicating out to faculty, to staff, and to administrators, that there are challenges coming at us, and we’re going to need to be able to make some changes to how we do things. And so they’re starting to instigate, for example, new thinking about how programs should change and how the structure of the institution might need to change, and really encouraging, internally, people to prepare themselves for doing something different so that they can survive in a new environment. And so I would say that’s sort of the third approach, the getting ready approach. The first is really all about cutting, the second is, “Just forget about it. It’ll be okay,” and the third kind of priming the pump, if you will, for future change that is going to need to happen in higher education institutions.

Rebecca: You noted there are some landscape differences between the US and Korea and Japan in terms of population density and literally the amount of land in different spaces. But can you talk about what we can learn from the experiences in Korea and Japan and ways that we might move forward here?

Peter: So I came into this thinking that there would be clear takeaways, but instead it left me feeling a little nervous about the situation in the United States, because in Korea and Japan, you had a highly interested government that was pretty deeply involved in maintaining the stability of higher education, whereas in the United States, the government is much more remotely involved. They’re not really directly getting into the nitty gritty of the provision of higher education within the country, they’re only really indirectly a part of what’s going on. And the good will that we see between higher education in Korea and Japan and the government doesn’t really exist here to that same extent. And so we don’t have someone looking after us…

Rebecca: …like a safety net…. [LAUGHTER]

Peter: …yeah, a safety net. And so the government in Korea and Japan, they created policies to make mergers more smooth, and they would use Ministry of Education reviews of higher education institutions to make adjustments to quotas for students at institutions to reduce the impact of demographic decline across the board, so that was more shared, but also so that institutions that scored lower on ministry reviews of their institution, or institutions they believed to have a lower quality were kind of cut off over time from this pool of students, so that there was a gradual change as time went on. But we don’t really have that here. It’s much more… it’s a free market, and people go where they want to go, and that can be really destructive, and it can bring a lot of change from one year to the next year, where institutions expect something, and then all of a sudden they just don’t have enough students to keep going on. And so the other sort of element of it is that there’s a positive public opinion of higher education in Korea and Japan, the sense that it’s a public good that we need, that we can’t live without, and I feel like people are questioning that here in the United States, and so we don’t have that same level of public goodwill to rely on as well. The one exception to that that I have is that there’s a strong connection between alumni and the institutions that come from here in the United States. So we do see some cases where alumni are sort of riding into the rescue, like Sweet Briar College, where alumni came together and donated to keep the institution open, to prevent it from closing. And so we do see some of that grassroots support coming from people who have a personal connection to the institutions. But I would say that that’s going to be the exception, rather than the rule. It’s just, I mean, alumni, you can only ask so much.

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s great news. When I was reading your article, I was like, “Oh, yeah, okay…”

John: One way of addressing this, and many institutions have been, is that we’ve had a lot of underserved populations in the US, people from low income communities, people who are first-generation college students and students from historically underrepresented groups have much lower college attendance rates, and this is a period of time when the rate of return to higher education is the highest we’ve ever seen in the US. But there may also be some political issues there, because in order to bring in some groups from lower income households, it does require larger amounts of subsidies, and we’re not seeing that same sort of increase. In this political climate, do you see that as being very likely as perhaps a way of expanding the reach of higher education and perhaps improving our rates of intergenerational income mobility?

Peter: Yeah, I would say one of the unique sort of opportunities available to us here in the United States is the fact that we have these large pools of people who maybe traditionally haven’t taken part in higher education, and as a result of which we can kind of cater to bringing in new people into higher ed, bringing in first-generation students, and it’s good for institutions because they can better respond to the fact that they don’t have as many applicants as they had in the past, or they don’t have as many students as they had in the past, and it allows them to support themselves. And it’s good for the students, because, as you mentioned, it opens doors economically to new sort of opportunities available within the US economy and different lifestyles within different social classes. And so I would say that, yeah, absolutely, that there is this unique opportunity here in the United States, but there are certainly challenges. The programs that are designed to help us with retention and to making adjustments to the way that we do things in higher education to be more responsive to the needs of students who are coming from a first-generation background are the very programs that are under threat now with the change that we’ve seen politically within the United States. And so this lifeline that we had is at real risk now because all of the effort that we’ve put into making higher education a more open and welcoming place to people coming from backgrounds that traditionally didn’t take part in higher education may feel less welcome as a result of a lot of these programs being shut down. In fact, I’m working on a study now on the impact of DEI programs having been made illegal in the state of Texas, and how that’s impacted the student experience there. And so I’m very interested to see what sort of results we get from that study. But I have a feeling that it’s not going to be all good news.

Rebecca: One of the other areas for potential enrollment growth that’s been discussed quite a bit in the US is the admission of more international students. There’s a lot of desire for international students to get US education, but you note that the political climate has become less welcoming. What’s the future of this looking like right now?

Peter: And this wasn’t true, not just in the US, but also Korea and Japan sought to attract more international students. They saw it as a potential way to respond to declining numbers of domestic students and provide support to institutions, and some institutions were quite successful in being able to draw international students. I wouldn’t say that higher education across the board really succeeded in Korea and Japan, but there were some key institutions that really excelled at this, and it became a niche for them that allowed them to sort of weather the storm. Here in the United States, I would say that we’ve always been a top choice destination for international students around the world. And so it’s pretty clear that we could rely on this, or it was pretty clear we could rely on this in the past, but what we’ve seen is that there was kind of an unfortunate mix of developments that occurred within the country that have made us less attractive as a destination. The first of which that comes to mind would be just COVID-19 really tarnished the image of the United States, just in the response and in a sense of sort of chaos that students felt while they were here in the United States. That they communicated back home, a sense of lawlessness, almost in the country, that this is a place where people don’t follow the rules and where there isn’t sort of a clear, organized response to issues or problems as they emerge, and that was very bad [LAUGHTER] for U.S. higher education, just because that type of damage to a country’s image is very difficult to come back from. It lingers. It’s almost generational change when people shift in their view of a particular country, and so that plays into decisions around where to go to study. And then the other you sort of alluded to is political change, and I don’t think it’s as simple as just a shift in administration, but we’ve witnessed in the public discourse a real change in how people talk and think about people who are coming to the United States from other countries, and people feel that, they feel that they hear it in the discourse. And you know when you’re not welcome, you know you’re visiting someone’s house, and you hear them talking about you in the kitchen, and they’re not saying nice things, unless you really, really want to be there, you’re just less likely to stick around. And I think that that has really contributed as well to this decline we’re seeing in the numbers of international students who have come to the United States. And so again, there’s always going to be institutions that because due to their reputation or due to their location, are still going to draw on a large number of students. But it’s not going to be a safety net for institutions who are most vulnerable to this decline, places that are located in rural areas or who are specialized in a particular academic area, or institutions that are very small, these are the places that are the least likely to attract international students, and so it’s just not a good solution, or it’s not the solution that many had hoped that it would be, at least at this time.

John: One other thing you talk about in your paper a little bit is shifting the focus of the course offerings and the focus of the programs offered by institutions. Can you talk a little bit about how that’s been done in Korea and Japan, and whether institutions here are already starting to do this a bit, and perhaps, might that be a way of maintaining the relevance and the strength of a larger proportion of higher ed institutions?

Peter: I think institutions are still trying to figure out how they can change the curriculum to make them fit into the society that we live in. And we see pressure on institutions coming from the labor market and then from this new discourse around accountability for institutions in terms of student outcomes in the labor market. And it makes me a little nervous, to be honest. I’m not sure that it’s necessarily a good thing, and in Korea, at least, I don’t know about this as much in Japan, but in Korea, we saw things like funding for our departments being tied to the percentage of students who were full-time employed with benefits a certain amount of time after graduation, and that funding levels for departments would shift to the point that even positions could go away. If you cannot provide successful employment outcomes for students, then the justification for that program or for those positions might go away. And so that created a lot of discomfort among faculty and among administrators who really felt the squeeze in terms of everything we do has to be targeted in some way to a particular job, and we need to be preparing students in some way for work. Everything we do has to be focused on getting students ready for work. And I think that that’s disruptive and not helpful for higher education. I think that those things are absolutely very important, but that they fly in the face of the mission of a lot of higher education institutions, and that there’s a real danger of losing touch with the original purpose of these institutions. And so I would say that I think I much more appreciate the efforts to just prepare people for change without necessarily knowing which direction we’re going to be headed, because otherwise, some of this is [LAUGHTER] quite disruptive and it’s destructive as well. It makes me a little bit nervous.

Rebecca: Given your experience, what role do you see faculty playing in shaping the future change that needs to come?

Peter: Well, in some places, we are seeing faculty taking a more proactive role in creating new programs and to creating even new schools. So I don’t know if you’ve heard much about, I believe it’s Arizona State University, they have, like a School of Ocean Futures and some pretty new sort of ways of organizing what the programs that are available at the institution with a clear focus on the future. So that they’re hopeful that students that come out of these programs are able to find a place in the future world, at least as they envision it. And so I think faculty members who sort of take the lead in this work and help to sort of reorganize higher education around what might be needed in the future, they have a role to play there if they’re able to do that. But in a lot of cases, faculty members are very resistant to any sort of change, and so, in fact, they’ve kind of become antagonists to any of this work. And I understand that. Higher education looked a certain way for a very long time, and that’s what people sort of envision it’s going to continue to look like in the future, and they are cynical about any sort of changes that others are trying to impose on higher education, and maybe rightly so.

John: And one of the ways, I think that we’ve seen that in the wider universe of colleges and universities is gutting some of the traditional liberal arts departments and majors. We’ve seen some schools give up music departments or give up art departments, or art history, or sometimes seriously cutting back on history or math and other areas. I gather that that’s something you probably would not advocate for as part of this transition to the future.

Peter: Liberal arts institutions are the greatest threat is the reality of it. So the institutions that we’ve seen closing in the Northeast in particular have been small liberal arts institutions, and so I am very much in favor of the mission of these liberal arts institutions, personally. But if people aren’t going because that’s not what they’re looking for in higher education, then the problem we have isn’t with the programs we’re offering. There’s a program with what people perceive as being valuable in the society and how social values have changed over time, that people aren’t interested in learning about music and they’re not interested in learning art, and that’s, to me, is terrifying, [LAUGHTER] but it’s the reality of what we’re seeing in terms of demand is that people want this very clear economic benefit as a result of attending higher education, and if they don’t see a clear one-to-one correlation, that they tend to be more dismissive of it as something that’s not necessary or something that they don’t need, which creates a lot of this pressure, and it’s used to justify things like gutting out some of these programs like you mentioned. I think higher education has grown dangerously sort of disconnected from public life, and that people see higher education institutions as something that’s very removed and something that’s stuck in the past and something that isn’t really tied to sort of public opinion and the public discourse, and that puts us in such a dangerous position, and so that really, really makes me worry about the future for higher education, because there isn’t a clear vision about where do we fit in the society of the future, what role do we play? And we’re becoming increasingly vestigial, almost, in the way that people talk about and think about higher education, in a way that leaves me very worried.

Rebecca: That seems like the critical difference too, that you identified in your study, really between the differences between Korea and Japan too, right? Is that really how it played out?

Peter: And even at a personal level, I could feel the difference working in higher education as a faculty member in South Korea. In society, I was awarded a certain amount of respect from anybody who learned that I was a professor or a faculty member, and people would seek out my opinion or seek out my participation in programs in a way that I just don’t see here in the United States. In a way, when people learn I’m a professor in the United States, their response is very different from in Korea, and that was sort of a warning bell for me in terms of, this is how they see higher education here. It’s very different from what I had experienced in other settings.

John: And on that cheery note… [LAUGHTER] you had mentioned the shift out of the Midwest and the Northeast into other regions of the country. So what types of differences do you see between the experience of the Midwest and the New England region in terms of the response to these shifts?

Peter: So I would say that the sort of the major difference that we see between the Northeast and the Midwest is that in the northeast, there were more successful mergers, and that has to do with the fact that there is less distance between institutions in the northeast, it is a little bit more densely populated, and so oftentimes the institutions that were having trouble were able to reach out to neighboring institutions, especially smaller institutions, would reach out to larger neighboring institutions, and they were able to come to some sort of agreement where they would merge. There’s one exception to this in the Northeast, where two similarly sized institutions, neither of which were struggling, this was Berklee College of Music and then the Boston Conservatory, they just spoke with each other and decided we should share these overhead costs that we’re dealing with, and we’ll become one music institution within Boston, and otherwise, it tended to be smaller institutions that were struggling reaching out to larger neighbors and getting some help and becoming a part of that larger neighbor. And oftentimes they would fill in sort of an area of relative weakness within that larger institution. Something that comes to mind, for example, is Wheelock College joining Boston University and becoming sort of the specialized college in education and human services within Boston University. And so there were some pretty happy stories there about mergers working out. It was more remote, small liberal arts institutions in the Northeast that were the most likely to close, and that contrasted a little with the eastern Midwest, where a lot of the times we saw religious affiliated institutions were the ones that were struggling. There were quite a few Christian colleges that weren’t able to find a way forward. And in terms of the mergers that we saw, they tended to be highly specialized institutions that were sort of gobbled up by neighbors that didn’t have a program or any offerings in that area, and saw it as an opportunity to expand out what they offered at their institutions. So the stories were pretty similar, but there were some differences in terms of the success rate of mergers and the types of institutions that were struggling in those different regions.

Rebecca: Well, with all that good news today, we always end by asking, what’s next?

Peter: This was a very, sort of a zoomed out look at what’s going on here in the United States. And I think that there’s some real value in taking a closer look at the stories of these institutions, those that do end up closing and then those that are able to make it through. And so I’m hoping to do a series of comparative case studies looking at institutions around the Northeast. There’s even one that’s quite close to us here in Aurora, New York. I think it’s Well’s and so I’m hoping to take a closer look at some of these institutions and their stories but haven’t decided the exact sort of focus I want to take. But part of me wants to look at the impact on the local economies of places that do close. What’s the sort of impact that we’re seeing on the people that live around the places where these institutions used to be located, and the places that do succeed, what role did their relationships to their local community play in their ability to kind of make it through and so I’m still in the brainstorming phase there, but this is something I’ve been thinking about doing.

John: Well, thank you. This has been such a cheery conversation, but it’s one that all institutions have to address, because we are going to be coming up to some really challenging times, and if higher ed institutions are to survive, they’re going to have to be a little bit creative and maybe more flexible in terms of addressing the changing environment in which we’re living.
But studies such as this, though, can perhaps give us more information about what paths have been successful. So thank you, and we’re looking forward to hearing your future studies.

Peter: Thank you, and thanks for having me on.

Rebecca: Yeah, thanks for the zoomed out look. I think that’s helpful for everyone to get a good grasp on what the landscape really looks like and how it does compare to some other places.

[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]

371. Student Motivation and UDL

Posted in accessibility, diversity, engagement, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, teaching, universal design
December 11, 2024

Providing more autonomy can increase students’ intrinsic motivation. In this episode, Chris Hromalik joins us to discuss ways of increasing student autonomy within the UDL framework. an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Distance Learning Instruction and Design at SUNY Oswego. He is also the Project Manager of the Universal Design for Learning at SUNY Project. In this role he provides Universal Design for Learning professional development across the SUNY system. Chris is also the recipient of a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. His research focuses on UDL as well as statistical analysis on applied linguistics and education.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Providing more autonomy can increase students’ intrinsic motivation. In this episode we explore ways of increasing student autonomy within the UDL framework.

[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 Chris Hromalik, an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Distance Learning Instruction and Design at SUNY Oswego. He is also the Project Manager of the Universal Design for Learning at SUNY Project. In this role he provides Universal Design for Learning professional development across the SUNY system. Chris is also the recipient of a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. His research focuses on UDL as well as statistical analysis on applied linguistics and education. Welcome, Chris.

Chris: Thank you.

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

Chris: I am. I have the Tazo RefreshMint. Very good.

Rebecca: Nice and relaxing, right?

Chris: It is.

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca: I am back to my Scottish afternoon tea.

John: …and I am drinking Darjeeling tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, you’re mixing it up, John. So Chris, we’ve invited you here today to discuss your work with UDL and instructional design. Can you talk a little bit about how you got started with UDL?

Chris: Sure. So thank you, Rebecca, thank you, John for having me here today. All of it began as far back as 2011 when I took my first course in accessible usable web design. And wow, it’s been a while, but at that time, Nancy Carr, who was the director of the Office of Accessibility Resources at Onondaga Community College, she recruited me to be an Office of Accessibility Resources ambassador, and the idea was to be able to make other faculty aware of how to work more closely with the Office of Accessibility Resources. And I was tasked with helping faculty to better understand digital accessibility, how to make their documents more accessible. With time, I ended up joining the Universal Design for Learning Academy, which, at the time, was funded by the Onondaga Pathways to Career Project through a grant from the Office of Disability Employment Policy through the US Department of Labor. The idea was to train faculty in the Universal Design for Learning Framework. We had a three-day workshop. It went very well, repeated three more times, extended to four days even, and ended up training over 110 faculty, staff, and administrators at Onondaga Community College. And then fall 2021 I ended up bringing it to the SUNY level, and here we are today. All is going well so far.

John: Well, I suspect most of our listeners are familiar with the basics of UDL. Could you just provide a really quick overview of what UDL is, and why should we consider using UDL.

Chris: Universal Design for Learning is a framework based on scientific insight into how humans learn that can help to make more accessible, inclusive, and usable learning experiences for students. We’ll talk a little bit more about the three principles of UDL throughout the interview today, but some of the main benefits would be that if we are thinking proactively about how we can design our instruction to reduce barriers for students during the design process, as opposed to trying to be reactive, and trying to then retrofit our instruction or change our instruction later, we can create learning experiences that are going to be better for all of our students. One of the examples I like to give comes from, going back to the Universal Design for Learning Academy back at Onondaga Community College, a fantastic professor of mathematics. Part of the Universal Design for Learning Academy was, during the summer, be trained in the Universal Design for Learning Framework, and in the fall, we would implement some sort of instructional intervention, some way that we would apply the UDL framework to our instruction with students. And this professor of mathematics had recognized that there was a unit of his instruction that was more challenging than others for his students. It was a lesson on eigenvectors, vector spaces, linear transformations. When you realize that this isn’t a matter of engagement, the students are really interested in this. These are math majors, they really like what they’re doing, but it was a challenging topic. And we took a look at the textbooks, how the textbook was this 2D presentation in text and mathematical formulas and that sort of thing. But he found a visual representation in the form of video that took this, what really is a more three- dimensional concept, and made it three dimensional, as opposed to the 2D representation of the textbook. And where I bring this in is that when we think about Universal Design for Learning, the idea is that we’re creating more accessible, usable, inclusive instruction for our students, but there are going to be benefits that are going to benefit everyone in the classroom. When this professor was thinking about how he’s going to present this, he presents the video, but he is also supplementing the video by describing the visuals aloud. Keep in mind the idea that if we have a student who is blind or has low vision in the class, how can we ensure access to all students in the classroom? And so he would take the time to describe the visuals aloud. And yes, this does benefit a student who is blind or has low vision, but all students are benefiting from this, because when the professor is making salient the most important information from this video, this benefits all the students in the classroom. And so the idea being that when we think about how we can design to reduce barriers for the students in our class, we’re able to then make a better learning experience for everybody.

Rebecca: On July 30, 2024, CAST, which is the organization that puts out UDL principles, released the 3.0 version of the UDL guidelines, both the earlier and current versions of the UDL Guidelines focus on course design that results in students having multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression. So those are the three overlying guidelines, but there were substantial revisions in how those guidelines are described. The 3.0 version of the UDL guidelines remove the word “provide.” Can you talk about the shift in focus away from having faculty provide these UDL features.

Chris: So, Rebecca, the shift that you’re referring to is the idea of moving from providing multiple means of representation, providing multiple means of action, expression, providing multiple means of engagement, and instead saying to design multiple means of representation, design multiple means of action and expression, design multiple means of engagement. And a lot of that comes down to this idea of moving away from a more teacher-centered approach to the classroom and having a more learner- centered approach to the classroom. And so a lot of what we’re going to see in these changes that are in the UDL 3.0 guidelines is this idea of moving toward a more learner-centered approach to the classroom. And it’s not like it wasn’t there before. The idea of teacher-centered of teacher-centered versus learner-centered, it’s always been part of it, but to place greater emphasis on the idea that it isn’t necessarily us as the instructors who are providing the learning experiences, and that we are the ones who are responsible for this. And I’ve seen this with the workshops that I’ve given, that one of the questions that I oftentimes will receive is, is the onus always on us as the instructors to be providing for the students. And so to me, when I saw the change, it made sense. It addresses some of the concerns that faculty in higher education have expressed to me, this idea of, well, we want our students to be intrinsically motivated. We want our students to be interested in what they’re learning. And so the idea is that we’re moving away from this idea of we are the providers of knowledge. We are the sages on the stage. It’s going to be a more learner-centered approach to the classroom.

John: The original guidelines focus on developing student expertise. The new guidelines focus instead on developing learner agency. What’s the purpose of the shift? And what are some ways in which instructors can do this?

Chris: So a lot of this does come back to the idea of learner-centered versus teacher-centered. Nothing has changed in terms of wanting our learners be expert learners. But the idea is, as opposed to focusing on understanding content, it’s more the idea of students taking ownership of their learning, the idea that students are going to help to shape the learning process. So when I think about learner agency and I think about learner autonomy, the first thing that I begin to think about is thinking about self-determination theory. So when we think about self-determination theory, we have three components that are going to influence our levels of intrinsic motivation. We have competence, whether or not we believe that we can actually complete a task or complete a task to a high level of quality. One of the others is relatedness, which we’ll talk a little bit about when we get into talking about some of the other changes that’s related to bias and exclusionary practices. We’ll talk about this idea of relatedness and autonomy is going to be one of the most important aspects, the idea of agency and being able to feel like you’re in charge of the learning experience. And if we think about the idea that if students are more intrinsically motivated, they have this inherent interest in learning, versus extrinsic motivated, going to be more outside influences. It’s the difference between having a student, for example, who’s interested in learning about something just because they are interested in the topic, versus someone who’s learning to get a better grade in the course. And if you want to be able to build up this interest in students’ inherent interest in their intrinsic motivation in the course, increasing their autonomy is going to help to do that. Intrinsic motivation, greater levels have been associated with greater academic performance, greater creativity in the classroom and so it all leads together. Thinking about it from a student success perspective, if we can increase learner autonomy, we can increase their intrinsic motivation, increase their academic performance, and one of the ways to do that is to be able to offer options to learners. But going even further then, in the 3.0 guidelines, offering students the option of having choice, to be able to discover resources on their own. As opposed to giving one textbook reading, could there be other options that we could offer to learners, or the learners can find their own options too? We have so many different things that can be found online, that allowing learners that agency, that autonomy, to be able to search out the information that’s going to help them to be successful and reach the learning objectives of the course.

Rebecca: Are there ways that you embed agency in the classes that you teach?

Chris: I’m going to give a lot of examples today, from online courses that either I’ve taught in the past or courses that I’m preparing at the moment. And one of the ways that, when you think about designing multiple means of representation, one of the ways to offer choice or offer more autonomy for learners is to be able to more guide them toward being able to find things, be able to offer different options. So we have our textbook readings, we have videos, instructional materials that come with it. Be able to point students toward other resources and guide them to understand how to actually purposefully search for information, because search, in and of itself, is a skill. To be able to create a purposeful search, be able to find resources on your own, is part of the learning process itself. So as opposed to just providing just the resources to be able to tell students, here are some other sources we can be consulting. Here are some other high quality resources and then be able to teach them how they can be able to search for that information on their own.

John: While UDL has always had a component of providing students with multiple means of engagement, to provide students with multiple ways of connecting to the content that is the focus of the class. The new guidelines include a focus on removing bias and exclusionary practices. Could you talk a little bit about what this sort of change involves and how it may affect the way in which courses are designed?

Chris: when I think about designing multiple means of engagement, typically when I have a shorter workshop or a shorter webinar, the way I’ll explain this, here’s a simple way of thinking about it is, as opposed to with designing multiple means of representation, where we are considering, how can we provide an accessible, usable option for how we present content, with action expression, how can we design an accessible and usable option for how students demonstrate the knowledge? With engagement, I think about relevance, and how can we design multiple examples for what we’re trying to teach students? So if we think about multiple examples, and we think about examples that are going to represent the diversity of our student population, this is going to help us to remove bias, be more inclusive in the classroom, and for the students to be able to then see themselves in what it is that we’re teaching. To get back to self-determination theory, for example, the idea of relatedness. And if we think about whether or not students do see themselves in what we’re teaching them, will we be able to then help them to build up intrinsic motivation, which, of course, then can lead them to be more successful? This is going to be something that can and has potential to increase student success, for them to be able to see themselves in what they’re learning. And also we think about feedback, one of the strategies I like to emphasize the idea of providing multiple examples of what we’re teaching, and especially thinking of examples, maybe outside of our typical canon. But if we also think about the feedback that we provide to students too, and if we’re providing feedback to students, ensuring that the feedback we’re providing is going to be free of bias as well too. This is a different example, it’s outside of higher education, but I think about the experience of my own daughter and thinking about some of the feedback that at a young age she would receive. That I am not necessarily your typical American in many ways. I don’t necessarily always have all the same customs and traditions. I don’t always honor the same customs and traditions, in the sense of we may do things differently at different holiday times, may eat different foods and what might be typical. And my wife is also not from the US originally. And so when we were raising my daughter, she wasn’t necessarily being raised with the same songs, with the same nursery rhymes, with the same poems and the same ways of doing things that other kids were, and the type of feedback that she received at a young age was there was just a misunderstanding of the fact that she wasn’t raised in the same way as many of her classmates, and it was a misunderstanding about her intelligence, a misunderstanding about what she was capable of doing, because there was a misunderstanding about her upbringing. So thinking about how we can provide feedback that’s going to be supportive and understanding of students who may not have the same lived experiences as each one of us. In the classroom, asking students to be able to provide their own examples, going back and thinking about my daughter and her experiences, they’re discussing in class different traditions they have for Thanksgiving, for the holidays, and having each of the students share their examples, what they do in their household. That it may be that there are different practices that each one of us has, and we may not even realize that they’re going to be different practices. So having students be able to have a voice to share their experiences in, for example, language classroom, students could share the types of foods that they have when they’re at home.

Rebecca: I think along the same lines, the new guidelines provide more focus on development of other things like student goal setting, self regulation, and metacognition. Can you give some examples of ways that you might incorporate these into a class as well?

Chris: So when I think about goal setting, when I think about self regulation, metacognition, the way that I like to incorporate this in the classroom is through reflection. I’m very much a strong proponent of reflective journal entries for students, and especially when in my online courses, I like to have weekly reflective journal entries as students submit one to two paragraphs, just thinking about their learning and how they’ve been learning up until now. And one of the first things we do at the very beginning is goal setting. And so when I think about self regulation, when I think about goal setting, it’s that idea of considering setting goals at the beginning, and how are we going to monitor our progress toward reaching those goals, and how are we going to regulate our emotions? How are we going to regulate our behavior? So in other words, how are we going to use learning strategies that are going to help us to achieve those goals? How are we going to, if there’s a setback, keep going toward reaching our goals? And so for me, when I have reflective journal entries, I like to base them around six dimensions of self-regulated learning. So that’s the “with whom,” the “what,” the “where,” the “when,” the “why,” and the “how” of self-regulated learning. So with whom? Well, basically, at the beginning of the semester, I’ll ask students to say why they’re even taking an online Spanish course to begin with, and what are their goals for the semester? Next week, we’ll be thinking about their learning environment. Where are they studying? Are they working in a distraction-free environment? What are some of the materials that they’re using in order to support their learning? We think about the with whom, with whom are they working? Are they working with other people? Are they asking for help? Are they seeking help when needed, if they have questions and concerns, are they reaching out to the instructor, reaching out to their peers? When we think about the when, another week’s reflected journal entry is to think about how do they manage their time? How do they plan their time? Do they set aside time for studying online? We start to get to our first exam, we think about going back to those goals again. What were your goals originally in your first week, your first reflective journal entry? Do you believe you’re on track to reaching those goals? If not, what can you do differently in order to get close to reaching those goals? So monitoring your progress. Think about how we’re going to change our behavior, adjust our learning strategies, in order to get more closer to reaching the goals we set for ourselves. And so that’s the idea and we’re thinking about the student goal setting that first day of class could be, why are you taking this course? What goals do you have for yourself? In a language course, it’s great because a lot of times our goal is, I want to travel. Or I want to be able to speak to somebody that at this moment I currently am not able to communicate as easily as I wish I could. And then, as we get a little bit further on the semester, we get our first exam back, so we get our feedback on that as we think through, am I working toward this goal? This can be done both online, it can be done a face-to-face classroom as well, and a lot of times we’ll have five minutes at the end of a class session, we’ll have we’ll have just five minutes that we’re not really sure what to do with it. And this is a great opportunity to have a written reflection. In the case of an online course, it could be an option of written versus a video submission for reflection. So we have goal setting, taking that time to reflect on what our goals are. Are we reaching them or working toward them, and what can we do to adjust our behavior in order to get there?

Rebecca: I can imagine that sometimes there might need to be some scaffolding or coaching around goal setting too, because depending on the discipline or shifting between kinds of courses, our expectations may not align with what our goals may even be initially. I want to be fluent by the end of this beginning Spanish class may not be a realistic expectation, and that can lead to frustration or other kinds of emotions that might get in the way of learning if we’re not being realistic about what our goals are.

Chris: And as soon as you were saying that, that was the first thing I thought of too, is in a Spanish 101 course, we’re working in the novice level. We’re beginning. We’re not going to leave being able to speak at a superior level. And this is the opportunity to be able to temper those expectations, to provide feedback to students and say, “Okay, I know we want to reach a certain level, but after four months, we’re only going to be able to reach this level” and to be able to put into clear words, well, this is what we’ll be able to do by the time all is said and done at the end of this course, and say, yeah, that is an opportunity to be able to help to keep expectations in check also.

Rebecca: You have a five-point plan that’s gonna take three [LAUGHTER] semesters to accomplish.

Chris:…but thinking back, even to as a student, I would actually prefer to have a student who has these high expectations and really just wants to shoot for the stars. I don’t want to bring them down, but somebody who has that enthusiasm? Obviously, we take courses to fulfill requirements all the time. We all did that as students ourselves. And so if that’s the reason for taking the course, well that’s great too. That is a reason for wanting to take a course. Wow, if we have someone who has these high expectations, well maybe we want to bring them down to more realistic expectations. But wow, it is also so exciting when you get someone who really wants to learn to communicate in the language and that really is their goal by the time they walk out of the classroom. It’s exciting.

John: One of the things that a number of economists have noted recently is that the rate of change in labor markets seems to have been accelerating in the last 30 or 40 years. A lot of the occupations that made up a large share of the labor force have effectively disappeared, and there’s lots of new occupations appearing. And I would think that this focus on self-regulated learning and so forth would be really helpful in helping students become lifelong learners because the skills they’re developing now might be very different than the types of skills they need in the future. So is that part of the reason perhaps for this shift?

Chris: Definitely, as we, ideally, will be more self-regulated learners, as opposed to other regulated, and being able to be more lifelong learners, being able to then adjust to to be able too, to be more flexible as learners, as you said, in the workforce, we’re in times that are constantly changing, whether it’s new technology, whether that’s going to be new requirements in the workforce. To be able to be lifelong learners, whether that’s through advanced certificates, whether that be through just being able to adjust to changes in technology, then yes, for sure, being more self regulated, opposed to being more other regulated, will definitely be a plus and an important part of how our students are going to be able to make the most when they’re moving into the workforce, for sure.

Rebecca: You just mentioned some new technology, and one of the things that we’ve talked a lot about on the podcast has been AI. And faculty have certainly been concerned about how the widespread availability of AI tools will affect student learning. What are some of the potential benefits and challenges associated with the use of AI in the UDL context?

Chris: So I’ll be honest and say that there’s a lot happening because, as you all know, and it can be difficult to follow change that is happening so rapidly and so a lot of different things that come to mind as I think about this question. The first is thinking about some of the concerns we have as faculty. And it’s true, we do have more concerns about whether or not we can maintain academic integrity, whether or not we’re going to be able to still be able to offer the same types of assessment that will be able to allow for critical thinking for students in the way that we have up until now. And so there are a lot of concerns for sure, when it comes to use of AI. A lot of really great things about it too, though. And so for me, it is a challenge thinking about that balance of where we have challenges, but also thinking about some of the benefits that we have, and especially when we think about benefits in terms of learner agency and learner autonomy, and helping students to be more self directed, more self-regulated learners. AI really does present an opportunity for that. A first thought that comes to mind when I think about my Spanish courses, if we’re completing a chapter of instruction and we’re working toward an exam, one of the most challenging aspects of that exam for students tends to be the composition. When we’re getting to an exam and they have to work on a piece of writing, basically, they’re going to be applying what they’re learning to a longer form piece of writing. And that can be difficult because it can oftentimes be difficult to get feedback on their progress along the way, and thinking about how AI could be leveraged in order for students who want to take charge of their learning, who want to be able to have this opportunity for practice and feedback, is to put into ChatGPT: “What have we been learning about? Here’s a vocab we work with. Here are the grammatical concepts. What are going to be some composition prompts that I might see on the exam? What could I possibly be asked to be able to do?” And from there, you can be writing up your composition and submit it and say, “Well, how did this go? What kind of feedback can you provide in terms of grammar, in terms of vocab, in terms of my overall performance of the task of the prompt you gave me, in terms of my creativity, in terms of how I’ve expressed myself at the 101 level?” So there are opportunities for us to use this to be more self-regulated learners. And I think that part of that comes from teaching students how to do that, to understand what are going to be the ethical ways of using AI. There are still going to be challenges. There are clearly challenges that we’re gonna face as faculty when it comes to AI and lots of transitions that are happening at the moment, but there are a lot of benefits that we could be seeing in terms of helping students to become more self-regulated learners, to feel like they have more autonomy in the classroom too.

Rebecca: Some faculty are reluctant to adopt a UDL framework in their classes because they are concerned that it could require a lot of time. What advice would you give to faculty who express this concern?

Chris: So I’m certainly feeling the crunch of time, and I imagine each of us in this room feels that way too. There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot happening. It isn’t that there aren’t good intentions. Is that there seem to be more and more things that are being given to us as faculty members. There’s more to do. Our days are full. You look at your calendar and you see where the free time is to be taking professional development. When you look for the time when you can make a change to something that you’ve taught 3, 4, 5 times already, there is a limited amount of time. And so what I would say is that one of the best ways to go about that then, if we were to thinking about what’s something we can be doing right away, what can we take from this podcast and be able to make changes in our face-to-face instruction, is to start to think about something small that we could do, that maybe might take a little bit of time now, but could eventually save us some time in the long run. And so I’m just gonna bring it back to UDL and some of the things that I’ll sometimes teach, and some of sometimes teach in some of the workshops that they give. One of the things is providing a model. So when I say providing a model, I’m thinking of a model assignment from a prior semester where a student might have completed a high-quality assignment. If you reach out to a former student, ask if you can share their work, anonymize it, and make it available to students, that takes a few minutes to do at the beginning, but can save you so much time in emails and questions that you receive from students. And so here we have a best practice of giving an example, giving a model to students. And it’s one of those things that can be done in a little bit shorter amount of time, but it can also save time for us in the long run. So these types of things, of building in best practices, can actually save us some time in the long run. When I think about offering a second option for an assignment where, if you can offer a second way that an assignment can be done, it can oftentimes save you, as an instructor, some time too. It may take five minutes to put in a second way of doing that in the assignment directions, but it can save you time. In my online courses, I spent years working with students who would tell me that they had difficulty writing diacritics, accent marks on compositions. And I would set up office hours time with students, and they would come and have extra time at the beginning of semester, and trying to work through, first it was Mac and PC, and then there were Chromebooks, and then there was iOS, and there was all that. And eventually one student said to me, can I just write it by hand and take a picture and submit it to the Dropbox? And then thought to myself, “Well, that makes sense. It all goes the same place. There’s no extra work for me. It takes me five minutes to change all the assignment directions. Why not just let everybody do it? If you want to type it? Great. 90% or so students will type it and submit it; for the other 10% that maybe would potentially withdraw from the course and move on to a different course.” Well, now I’ve retained them because they have the second option. It saves me time. I don’t have these extra office hours on my calendar anymore. I’m not answering as many emails. So some of these best practices of offering a second option that still gets at that same learning objective, these are types of things it can save us time. I think that’s where a lot of challenge comes in, is time. There’s just not time. A lot of times, even for for taking part in a lot of things we wish we could.

Rebecca: It might even bring you a little bit more joy, because you don’t have to have a meeting about how to put diacretics.

Chris: I’m thinking, my reflective journal assignments… I love having a second option of video. So I will get, again, 90% of students will just write one to two paragraphs. Every so often, I’ll get a student who takes me up on the idea of a second option of one to two minutes max on your video. When they do it’s like, “Wow, I feel like I’ve gotten to know this person better.” They seem to be really interested in it. They’ll do it kind of just video blog style, and it’s really interesting. And so yeah, just the joy that comes from a second way of completing an assignment that still reaches that same learning objective. It can make it interesting for us as faculty too. We need that every so often, that little spark of joy that keeps us interested in doing what we’re doing, no matter how difficult it can be.

John: And I’m reminded of Tom Tobin’s suggestion of a “plus one” strategy. Just make one change, and over time, those changes will accumulate, and you’ll end up with courses that are more engaging for students and for you,

Chris: It is sometimes just taking those baby steps. It’s doing something, taking one step, moving the needle just a little bit, because it can be very demotivating if we try and do too much at once. If we try to put too much into place, it will no longer be something that’s going to bring us joy. It’s going to be something that’s going to be demotivating for us and also for the students. If we try and do too much, it can be confusing, it can be blurry. To have too many things going on at once. So trying just little baby steps is in many ways better to be able to just try to start small and make small changes.

Rebecca: I like to remind people that accessibility isn’t an on and off switch, it’s a spectrum. And so you think that you can just turn it on or get somewhere where it’s just on, it’s not really a thing. So if you just remember that it’s a spectrum, and you keep working towards making it better and better, and it’s iterative, then it’s an ongoing process.

Chris: I’ve been working with document accessibility since 2011 and I still learn something new all the time. I have a lot to learn, for sure, and it’s little steps, little things to do to continue to improve, for sure,

Rebecca: Incremental change for the win. So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Chris: Wrapping up the semester, winter break, preparing for the spring. That’s kind of where I’m just thinking that light at the end of the tunnel, starting to see it.

Rebecca: It sounds like one step at a time.

Chris: Yes, that’s exactly it.

Rebecca: Well, thanks for joining us.

Chris: Thank you, Rebecca; thank you, John,

John: Thanks. It’s great talking to you, and we look forward to more conversations.

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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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366. Connecting to Core Values

Posted in authentic learning, classroom community, diversity, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, first-generation, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, income inequality, learning, motivation, pedagogy, racism, social justice, STEM education, teaching
November 6, 2024

Engaging and motivating students starts but doesn’t end with inclusion. In this episode, Bryan Dewsbury joins us to discuss ways of connecting class content to students’ core values to prepare students to productively engage with their communities as we work with our students to make our disciplines more equitable.

Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biology at Florida International University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Science Education and Society research program, an Associate Director of the STEM Transformational Institute where he directs the Division of Transformative Education, and a Fellow in the John N. Gardner Institute. Bryan is also one of the co-authors of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. He is the developer of a free MOOC on Inclusive Teaching, offered through the HHMI Biointeractive and Science and Education Society. Bryan is a highly regarded keynote speaker and workshop leader.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Engaging and motivating students starts but doesn’t end with inclusion. In this episode, we discuss ways to connect class content to students’ core values to prepare students to productively engage with their communities as we work with our students to make our disciplines more equitable.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guest today is Bryan Dewsbury. Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biology at Florida International University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Science Education and Society research program, an Associate Director of the STEM Transformational Institute where he directs the Division of Transformative Education, and a Fellow in the John N. Gardner Institute. Bryan is also one of the co-authors of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. He is the developer of a free MOOC on Inclusive Teaching, offered through the Hhmi Biointeractive and Science and Education Society. Bryan is a highly regarded keynote speaker and workshop leader and he recently provided the keynote address at the Academic Affairs Retreat here at SUNY-Oswego at the start of the current semester. Welcome back, Bryan. It’s good to see you.

Bryan: Thanks for having me back. I hope that the welcome back means that I was good the first time. [LAUGHTER]

John: People are still talking about your keynote. They were really impressed.

Bryan: Well, I’m glad you all enjoyed it. How are you all doing?

Rebecca: We’re doing great. Today’s teas are:… Bryan, are you drinking some tea?

Bryan: I’m not right now because I actually did have some for lunch. So I’m on campus right now at FIU, Florida International University, and I had lunch with a colleague, and we did have some tea. So, does earlier count?

Rebecca: Sure. Do you want to tell us what you had earlier?

Bryan: I don’t know if I said this in the last episode I was here, but I grew up in Trinidad. I know I said that part, but when I was growing up, the main tea that at least my mother would buy is Lipton. Like it’s almost to the point where most of us didn’t know there were other types. [LAUGHTER] So you come to America and you see, like 19 labels in the grocery, but of course, because of that, that’s kind of the tea I like the most, because that’s just what I was used to. So when I do see it, I like to have it. I’m not a big tea drinker. Oh, that sounds like sacrilege to the podcast, but when I do drink tea, that’s sort of my preference, and it’s just maybe kind of a nostalgia thing. So that’s what I had.

Rebecca: That makes sense.

John: I have a tea which is new to me. It is a black tea with cherry from one of Rebecca’s local tea shops, and I forgot the name. I had to rush here from a meeting, so I didn’t get a chance to jot down the name. But it’s delicious.

Rebecca: Oh, I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’ve mentioned it before. I think the smell of the cherry teas are really good, which enticed me to buy them. And then I discovered I like, absolutely hate the flavor of cherry teas.[LAUGHTER] And so I gifted them all to John because he likes them. I have just a Scottish afternoon tea today. John.

John: Very good.

Rebecca: Nice and plain, without any cherries. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your work on inclusive teaching. Could you tell us a bit about how inclusive teaching has become a substantial focus of your work?

Bryan: Yeah, so it’s a good question to answer, because, how do I put this? I actually don’t think it has. It has, but it hasn’t. Let me explain why. I do talk about inclusive teaching a lot, but the real focus of my work is education that is designed in a way that everyone can access it, and when they access it, they can be their best selves in that experience. And when they are their best selves, then they become this really engaged, loving, thriving participants in an evolving democracy. That in three sentences, if that was three sentences, that’s the thing we are trying to unpack as a group, not just through research, but through communication, through professional development. And so the inclusive part is a step towards that big a goal, because for the thriving to happen, for the access to happen, we have to sort of figure out, what are the barriers that are currently present that don’t allow people to be their best selves when they’re in a classroom, that don’t allow students to access certain institutions, that don’t allow them, even when they do access them, to graduate with the kind of credentials and the kind of mindsets and ways of knowing, ways of being, that allow them to understand how crucial it is for them to be engaged participants in a democracy. So inclusion is part of the riddles that we are trying to solve, but it’s not the end point, and to that extent, we have written a lot about it, I’ve talked a lot about it, but I think it’s important for people to know that our goals are bigger than that, without diminishing inclusive work, our goals are much bigger than that.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about your work in the STEM Transformational Institute in particular? I think it’s interesting in that role, how the role of democracy in your work, in moving democracy forward, fits into STEM because we don’t always hear those in the same sentence,

Bryan: Yeah. Well, yeah, or never, right? So I think that there’s two questions you’re actually answering. So I’ll talk about the institute first. It’s a pretty remarkable group. I’m one of several fascinating individuals who work here on the faculty side. Many of us, like myself, have a departmental appointment, whether it’s biology, engineering, physics, math, chemistry, and some other percentage of our appointment is with the Institute. What that allows is most… all of us, actually… were trained in some STEM discipline at the undergrad and PhD level. And so we can teach the classes. We can teach basic science classes. We can think about that ecosystem and that culture, right? Biology culture, physics culture, but discipline-based education research compared to other fields of research in biology, physics, or any of the above is relatively recent. And I think there is an understandable challenge of traditional STEM scientists in understanding and evaluating the kind of work that people like myself do. And so having a place like the STEM Transformation Institute creates several things. Number one, a community, for those of us who are thinking about education research in STEM to collaborate, to be in community, to ask questions, to write grants together. But also, there’s a mechanism for us when we kind of go through the ladder process for the STEM transformation Institute, to contribute some kind of understanding, to put all packages in perspective. Obviously, when you have this amount of faculty, and I think it’s maybe 20 of us, I can’t remember the exact number, some economies of scale benefits come with that. And so you can write bigger grants, because you have the intellectual capital there, you can have much more collaboration across the different STEM disciplines and with non-STEM disciplines. And then the Institute also has a unit called FIUTeach, which mainly focuses on training pre-service STEM teachers, a pretty robust, maybe the nation’s largest learning assistant program, undergraduate learning assistant program. And there might be some other pieces to it, but those are kind of the three things we tend to be known for on campus. So now, pivoting to your question about STEM and democracy, without taking up your whole podcast [LAUGHTER] giving a history lesson on Enlightenment thinking, the STEM instruction that we are seeing in classrooms today is really a product of maybe, I would say, a mix of the post-World War Two US higher ed-government alliance that kind of proliferated at that time, and the Humboldtian model of graduate education that became popular in the early 1900s. I think John Hopkins may have been the first place that some of that started and then some of the Sputnik-era stuff. And so the way too superficial summary of it is, if you were trained as a subject matter expert in STEM, your role in class was basically to tell people stuff. It wasn’t, perhaps said explicitly, but you were a big gatekeeper to that information. Because, remember, there was no World Wide Web, there was no Google search. In some cases, there wasn’t even really a lot of textbooks, right? And if there were, prohibitively expensive. So the only way you got to find out how big the glaciers were in in the Arctic was to hear the person who got on the boat to go there to talk about it. And there’s some other pieces to it. And I would encourage listeners to read the book Amateur Hour by Robert Zimmerman, because it’s discussed way more specifically and way better than I’m describing it, but there was some gender dynamics to this, because remember the normal schools that existed in the 60s and 70s, and who were the faculty there, and then, because of that association, how college faculty felt about teaching as a skill in and of itself. So there’s a brief period where there was some discussions about college professors getting trained. That died. [LAUGHTER] That didn’t last very long. So okay, I’m saying all of that to perhaps take us even further back to the role that Enlightenment thinking played in the Declaration of Independence, and more specifically, the influence that Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, in particular, who wrote Treatises of Government played an influence in Thomas Jefferson and some of the language that you see in the Declaration of Independence, and I’m thinking of one line in particular: “We submit these truths” to “a candid world…” Book recommendation: Jill Leporie These Truths, some of this is me interpreting her writing. It’s basically kind of saying, Look, man, we have these 13 colonies, we’re gonna try this out. We’re not gonna get everything right. We’ll see what happens and we’re gonna have to keep working at this. And in the same way, the scientific method and Enlightenment thinking comes with some expectations of critique, self critique, public critique, falsification, seeing new evidence and changing your mind on things and all of the above moving towards the sense of whatever you’re trying to understand. It improves over time because you are willing to keep refining and refining and refining. So in so doing, STEM, or specifically, science, has so much to teach us as citizens of a nation that is constantly trying to improve and what an improvement process looks like from a social perspective. And this is what I tell students: same when you collect data and okay, right now, it seems like you can’t disprove your knowledge, however you want to put that, but somebody’s going to come across and collect different data and critique those assumptions and improve on your methods. And that’s how we have vaccines that could be made in like two hours now, right? I mean, I’m exaggerating. So that same humility you have to display when you approach your intellectual pursuit is the same humility that I’m asking you to think about when you are in the public domain, when you are at church, when you are listening to news, when you are making consumer purchases, when you are listening to information come across your television. When you have to absorb all of the endless data that exists out there, that same critical mindset, but also mindset of humility that we ask of you in this culture of science and the culture of STEM, that has transferable lessons to other parts of how you live your life. And I think it’s a very under discussed component of STEM teaching, of how just STEM itself and science itself, the practice of science, is discussed with students. And I guess, Rebecca, what I’m basically said to you in five minutes is that we lean heavily into it, right? We talk about these things openly.

Rebecca: That’s great.

John: And we’re living in a world where we do need an informed citizenry, because there’s so many sources of information out there that are not so reliable, and the development of those critical thinking skills are incredibly important right now, given all the various sources of misinformation.

Bryan: And part of it too is I’m only… I don’t know if I should say only… but I’m 44, so I’m old enough to have grown up in a time when you had to go to an internet cafe to check your email for $20 an hour. We lived through this just remarkable transition of information ubiquity. I mean, I had a Encyclopedia Britannica set from A to Z like my mom used to joke with me, I would read it like a book. That’s how nerdy I was, right? And I remember looking at those 18 books or whatever, and thinking like, how much information is in here. You have that times infinity at the click of a button. I would just wonder, if we don’t pause long enough to reflect on what a sea change that is in terms of having easy and quick access to information. Now, that’s not the same thing as having knowledge. [LAUGHTER] So now the challenge has shifted. So if maybe initially it was being able to access that information and knowing all of the beautiful things that is happening around the world, now it’s how do you sift from all of this to pick out the information that’s useful, that’s credible, that’s reliable, that’s truthful. And I think our teaching and the way we think about teaching needs to shift with that. I don’t know, man, sometimes John, Rebecca, I have all due respect for online classes, this is not like a for or against, but I’ve always taught in person throughout my career, and I just absolutely love it. But as a commodity, and using the class that I teach a lot, intro bio, all of the learning outcomes I have in my syllabus, all of them, you can find a very good lecture on YouTube for free. You’re not gonna find maybe the test bank and all that. I get it, all of that, right? So in terms of accessing the information that we talk about in the class, the tuition and the three credits, and Bryan Dewsbury, I’m not a buyer. You just need a laptop and good working internet. So what is the added value I provide? What’s the added value that the institution provides by asking you to fork over a tuition check and housing and gas money to get to campus and all of that stuff, to physically be here. And I’m really curious, just as a thought experiment, if you were to put that question to all instructors, what will we say? What can we honestly say? Maybe 10,15, 20 years ago, you would say, “Well, how else would they know how DNA replicates? [LAUGHTER] I got a PhD in DNA, so therefore I have the right to tell you, right?” But I don’t think that argument holds as much water anymore, any water. And that, to me, is not perhaps the challenge, is the opportunity of the new information landscape.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that you bring up the encyclopedia in that kind of curated experience, but there’s also curated experiences online. Sometimes it’s hard to find those curated experiences to know that something’s of good quality, but even if it’s a curated experience, and even if it’s an inexpensive or free experience, you still have to have the motivation and the determination and the context, maybe, to put the pieces together to kind of figure it out on your own. [LAUGHTER] If you have something on the side, like you’re trying to do. How many of us have tried to sit and learn and do something on your own? I’ve been sitting and trying to crochet in the round in the evening, and I sometimes get frustrated using a video. [LAUGHTER] I want someone to show me how to do it, like, sit there and I can ask questions, and I want it to be interactive. This is just one example of just a thing that you want to learn from a person and have a dialog and be able to troubleshoot and have someone’s expertise to work through. And you think about the opportunity that you have as a faculty member to curate experience with readings and activities and classroom experiences, and then faculty maybe complain that students don’t engage in that full experience, and sometimes it’s because students can’t quite figure out what’s relevant to the next step or whatever. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that you might connect those assignments or other things that you’re doing in your classes to give students that relevance, or to actually answer your own question, like, what is it that we’re doing in our classes that give the students the reason why to come to class or why to do this experience, as opposed to do it on the side?

Bryan: Yeah, great question. Rebecca. So I’ll give you three examples that address your question, perhaps in slightly different ways. To me, another way of asking your question is when we do something in a class or when we have things in our syllabus or curriculum, why is it worth doing? That is a fair question for somebody, especially at the prices college is asking students to pay. That is a fair question to ask. And there are perhaps too many situations, maybe not intentionally, where there is an implicit eat your vegetables approach in that, “because I said it’s worth doing,” right? Like I have the great book, and I’m the PhD, and it’s worth doing, and so therefore you should believe. And I think my first part of my answer to you is to make that “why” more explicit. So we start the class not even talking about bio. First assignment is a reflection assignment that I shamelessly stole from National Public Radio called “This I Believe,” it’s on, it’s a public website, it’s: thisIbelieve.org/guidelines and the prompt asks… I’m summarizing here: “Describe the values that shape your deepest passion.” Before we get into anything technical. I want us to start this community by reflecting on what your why is, because your why, if you understand that clearly, or if you at least begin the mental process of exploring that, that is a big of why you’ll be motivated to be your best self, pursuing the technical piece. This could have easily been, you show up and I give you a bunch of materials, you show me if you know it or you don’t know it, and move on. But forcing you to really ask: “Well, why pre med? Why medicine? There’s so many things you could be doing in biology. There’s so many other great things you can be doing with all the other majors in this school. Why that choice?” So that sort of begins a very particular kind of conversation, because I expressed them my why and why I chose to be a professor, and why that was exciting to me, and why I love this class and love them. The second thing is, when we’re doing certain activities, regardless of what the subject matter is, they are implicit behaviors in how you do a technical task and get a solution that I think in a lot of times in a lot of teaching approaches, it happens as a function of the class, but it’s not made explicit that those behaviors are very important skills that you should be developing as you go forth as a technical expert. So when you put students in groups, for example, it might make things easier to grade, because now you’re just doing x divided by four or whatever assignment, there’s that piece. And I understand, like, you know, what the active learning literature says about group work and things like that, but what you’re really doing, my friends, is you’re teaching people how to work with difference. If you set those groups up right, If you talk about what positive group behaviors look like, what implicit biases look like, you are preparing them for a world of work, a world of engagement, where they will be in one type of group or the other. I can’t think of a profession… well, I could think of one, but not that many… where you will essentially be solo and so some of those group behaviors that really makes group work effective, like active listening, respecting silence, by hearing different opinions, being willing to accept critique, being able to give respectful critique. We have whole discussions about what that’s like and why it’s important. So it’s not just going to groups, and we hope everything works out. It’s going to groups, and this is a thing, and in order for this thing to go, well, let’s actually have a discussion about why that thing matters. The third part of my answer is, at selected points in the semester we try to make, or not try, we make very clear the ways in which scientific practice intersects with society. And this is where I think people get a little confused, perhaps, about what we mean by inclusive or equity-minded teaching. I remember once I saw on Twitter, and I know Twitter is what it is, right? But somebody put a statement that said, what is so inclusive about the mass of boron? [LAUGHTER] And I get where they’re coming from. I get why they would say that, but it, of course, betrays a misunderstanding of what we mean when we talk about inclusion in a classroom, there’s a lot of technical things that we discuss in an intro bio class, and not everything we talk about, we sort of bend over backwards to then relate it back to some social context. But there are things that do allow themselves to make that connection very, very clear. And the connection basically comes down to: science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Science is done by people, and the people is human beings who ask those questions. Human beings ask those questions, and human beings decide which questions to ask. They decide which questions are the important questions to ask. They decide when they ask those questions, and they carry out studies, they decide how those studies are conducted. And they don’t only decide how those studies are conducted, they interpret what data they collect from those studies, and they write the narrative that comes out of that analysis, that comes out of that interpretation. This is not to demonize any particular individual who does anything on any one of those steps, but it is to point out the reality that since the bridge between the existence of nature and life and life science and our understanding of how this works, if the bridge is the human being or human beings plural, who help us to understand that, then by definition, the social positioning of that individual, of those individuals, may sometimes color how we come to understand the world as a collective. And we have slight examples of this: that they took, what 10, 15, years to ask what female chimpanzees did, because only men were in the field, right? And then we have very, very dark examples of this when we thought eugenics was a real thing and we were sterilizing disabled people in North Carolina. So throughout history and even today, we are saying to students that you will go forth to be some wonderful whatever you plan to be, whether it’s medical doctors, whether it’s health professionals, public health, whether it’s research scientists, whatever it is. And there will come a time when you will be a decision maker. You will be the one they come to to try to understand, how do we reduce COVID rates? How do we keep people safe? And when you get this, it’s important for you to understand that COVID doesn’t care who it infects, the differential rates of deaths and the differential rates of infection is not because the virus itself made that differentiation. It is simply following a pathway that was already constructed along social lines. And so if you really want to get at the root of the problem, you have to understand how those social lines were constructed. I’m not saying you have to get a PhD in Sociology, but I’m saying I have to know enough to be dangerous. And so that’s the argument that’s made to talk about Flint, Michigan when we talk about the effect of lead on the nervous system. That’s the argument we make to talk about Tuskegee when we talk about the study that took place there. And it’s not to say, and this differentiation is important, This is not to just say that “Hey man, America is a terrible place. We’ve done some really terrible things.” I mean, we have done some terrible things in history, but what the goal of that discussion is to say “but we can learn. We can do better.” We have examples of looking back and saying “That was a mistake.” As a social science researcher, every study I do, I apply for Institutional Review Board approval because those things happened. It’s unfortunate that those things had to happen, but now we know better. So it’s important that that piece is there because sometimes, unfortunately, the narrative or the interpretation of having these discussions is you’re just trying to make people feel bad. You’re just trying to make America to be this terrible place. And no, no, it’s a great place, because of the capacity to learn. So anyway, I hope that answers. Those are the three parts all woven together, Rebecca. I hope that’s fine.

Rebecca: Thank you.

John: So. much of what you’re discussing there is just finding ways of helping students connect what you’re teaching in classes to their own lived experiences, rather than just seeing it as this isolated material separate from the societal context in which it exists?

Bryan: Yes. Yes would be the short answer to that. And just to get into the specifics, right? I mean, I think sometimes a listener might hear like, “Okay, now do I have to go and find out every single student’s life specifics and find something that connects to that? And again, I’m not saying that that’s what you have to do. I think it’s good, and I appreciate that some people have very large class sizes, so sometimes some of these strategies can become overwhelming, depending on what your load is. But there are low-lift ways to get a sense of who your students are, where they’re coming from, what was the class they took before yours? If you’re at an institution where there’s sort of a very set matriculation pathway. If most of them are coming from local high schools, there are ways for you to get at least a summarized sense of the students that you teach. The other piece to it, though, is not just like, what’s your community, let me make it relevant. The classroom is also a place where you hopefully get introduced to an understanding of the world that you may not have encountered had you not come to that classroom. Part of the beauty of teaching is the ways in which we open students up to new experiences, new ways of thinking, including ways that may challenge the ideologies and ways that they had before they walked in the door. I’m not saying that this is what you were doing, John, but sometimes people think about culturally relevant teaching, and it gets trapped in a “if you’re from this neighborhood, let me talk about this neighborhood.” It’s like, well, no, it’s way more than that. It’s way more than that. One of the blessings of a country like this is the amount of diversity there is across so many lines, and you need to have to physically live next to the diversity, to know and learn and appreciate and just see its beauty. This is another place that college does it just through the classes, through texts, through learning, through studying, through inquiry, you learn more and more about the world and yourself. So it’s a little bit of both.

Rebecca: Along the same lines, one of the great things about being a faculty member is that same thing, that the students bring some really great experiences that we haven’t had either, and allowing them to bring their stories and experiences into the classroom allows us to continue to grow and learn on a constant basis too. It’s great when they can bring those things too.

Bryan: I mean, especially when you grew up going to internet cafes to use the internet. At this point, they’re coming in with high-speed computers in their pockets, right? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah.

Bryan: They grew up in a completely different environment. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So you started off explaining how you get to know your students a little bit at the beginning, you start not even talking about biology in a bio class. Can you talk a little bit, maybe further down the line in the same class, and how civic engagement may enter into that same course later down the line?

Bryan: Yeah, so and this, you can perhaps consider this more social context than civic engagement, but I just so love this assignment and love the kind of discussions that come from it. We talk a lot in bio class about DNA as a molecule and all of that stuff, and it’s chemical structure. But we also spent some time talking about what led to the discovery of DNA. It’s a fascinating story. It’s a story about a time when there were not that many high-resourced labs in science. And so you can look up the book Double Helix, if you want to get a fairly brief version of it. But there’s also a story where if you were a woman in science, how the community responded to you, was very different to how they do now, although they’re pretty well documented cases where, not in all cases, that have changed, right? And so it does open up a conversation. First, we talk about the lack of credit that Rosalind Franklin initially did not get, but then we also talk about where we are now. There’s a really good documentary called Picture a Scientist solely focused on that issue, and we have discussions about why those things matter, and the role that power and hierarchies and power dynamics play in the experiences that people have. And I really want to emphasize, this is not to say I’m preparing you for a doom and gloom world and everything will be terrible. I’m preparing you for reality. And the reality is, I certainly wish for you a lot of great experiences, and I think you will mostly have that. But the reality is there’s still a lot of work to be done for us to get to the place of equity that we claim we have, [LAUGHTER] and the discussion of the gap between what we think we have and where we need to be is really my invitation to you to help work on that problem, but also to be aware of what may come when you get there. And I hope listeners take my comments in that spirit. So to the extent, Rebecca, that’s sort of an example of what you might encounter when you get out there in society. That’s one example of a conversation that takes place.

John: In addition to the issue of trying to make STEM classes more engaging for students, one of the problems that we see is that there’s some pretty significant differences between the DFW rates for first-gen students, for Pell eligible students, and students from historically minoritized groups, which is tied to differences, in large part, in the quality of education that they receive, and that serves as a barrier where many students enter into college planning to go into a STEM field, but end up not being as successful and then either transferring into other disciplines or leaving college altogether. What are some ways in which we can overcome the opportunity gaps that students face if they haven’t come in with as strong of a preparation for success in STEM?

Bryan: So a couple years ago, I published a paper about inclusive teaching methods and active learning methods, and a big crux of that paper, we talked a lot in the paper about what we did in the class and how much we cut content to really focus in on this sort of very social relationship-driven model of teaching. And in that paper, we not only reduced the DFW rates that you just described, John, but also when that group went on to future classes, they did fine, not just fine, they actually did better comparatively to peers from other sections. And some people, perhaps who hadn’t read the paper yet, kind of assumed that when we said everybody did fine, it meant everybody got As. And that is not the truth. We have a pretty high pass rate, but the class size average over the years that I taught it was in the 150s, it was a large class, and then maybe 10 or 15 years, there wasn’t a ton of students who… we had a very diffuse assessment model, a lot of quizzes, a lot of case studies and other stuff like that. And so what I’m saying that to say is that I don’t want people to feel that, for students who may come into your institution, who had 18 years of a social structure that wasn’t set up to engineer the best out of them. It is very difficult to right all those wrongs with one semester of an intro class. Now, at the same time, I can hold multiple truths in the same conversation, it is all well and good. In fact, this is just my personal belief, I don’t know if everybody shares it. I do believe, no matter what your circumstances are, even if they were really terrible, that within you there’s your potential to be great at science. There’s a potential to be great at biology. The question then becomes, given all of that history, what is needed to get you to a place where you can see that and take the reins of the chariot and go be your best self. And sometimes that may mean half of that first semester. Sometimes that may mean two semesters of Cs or failing a class and coming back. But the important thing is, I start from a place of the potential is there. I don’t know when the light will start to shine, but I’ve been doing this job for now almost 11 years, and I’ve been with students It took years for that light to switch. So what would happen, I can just tell you, on the ground with that intro bio class, for some of them that turn around point came like nine weeks in, and it’s one of the most satisfying and gratifying experiences as a teacher. When you see that student is like, “Ah, it’s not that bad.” And of course, by that time, there isn’t enough assessment for them to magically get an A between mid-October and December, but they might get to C plus, might get to B minus. They have to really nail a bunch of stuff. But here’s the difference, when they start the second semester, not with me, when they start the second semester of the institution, your now a different person. You’re not the same person who came in first year not sure of yourself, not confident, didn’t think you belonged in science, had a fixed mindset about math and all of that stuff. No, no, no. Now you know, yes, if I have the right strategies, I have proven to myself, and some of this is coming straight from motivation theory. I have evidence that if I take the right approach, good things will happen. And that’s why I brought up this paper. That’s why those C pluses in first semester turn into As in their second semester, because you’re not dealing with the same student. So that in a nutshell, is my lesson, in that there’s a whole discussion to be had about primary and secondary education. There are brilliant people having those discussions, read everything. Diane Ravitch writes, that’s a whole discussion we need to have in this country. There is also a role that institutions of higher education can play in that discussion, but specific to people who are privileged to teach classes, especially at the introductory level, that to me is a mindset I would like to have, assume the best, assume that it’s there, and know that the work that to teach, if I had to define teaching, to teach, is a degree to which you can walk a student from their current state of readiness to that place where they see what their potential can really be. That, to me, is the act of teaching, the content is part of the mechanism of the vehicle that drives that process. But teaching is a process, and that’s the process,

John: So encouraging a growth mindset is really critical to this process, it would seem. But the other thing is, you’d have to design your course in a way where you can’t use too many high-stakes assessments, especially early on where students could get deterred. You need to provide some mechanism so that students can, by the end of the class, get those Bs or C pluses and so forth, right?

Bryan: So, yeah, I mentioned earlier in this conversation a diffuse assessment model, right? And that’s done on purpose. So the psychology behind the high-stakes assessment, especially ones that are early. If it’s super high stakes and very early and they don’t do well a couple issues: One, mathematically, it makes recovery very difficult, you’re already down to a B minus after exam 1, you don’t have much wiggle room to even pass the class; the second thing is, and this is why I like to talk about teaching as a process and a relationship, because there’s a psychology to it… there’s a psychology that you need to understand, especially with first-year students, and what it means to transition into this environment. We don’t have enough time on this podcast today to summarize all the literature on emerging adulthood, on sense of belonging, on John Henryism, that all these things that are invisible, that are in the air and that even the students themselves may not be able to articulate, but it’s happening. And so what it means to be a teacher and be able to read the subtitles and see how certain behaviors are indicative of some of those processes happening, that’s the challenge. So your high-stakes exam, especially that first one, could be simply measuring the presence of those psychologies, not actual ability, not actual learning. You can just be capturing the fact that somebody is scared to death. You could be capturing the fact that somebody is carrying the weight of a generation at home and you must be a doctor, you must be this, you must be that. And that’s high stakes. This is playing out on that exam. They’re never going to say it to you that way, but it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. [LAUGHTER] And so part of the diffuse assessment model is to say, “Look, I am going to do my best to design assessments that accurately reflect learning, and the stakes are going to be high enough that I think you will take this seriously. But the goal of these assessments is to provide both of us, myself and you, the student, information that gives us some sense of where you are in this learning journey. And when we get that information, depending on what it says, we can have a discussion. We can have a specific discussion.” And I can say things like you do really well on recall questions, but you seem to struggle when I say explain. You have all of the language of this process in there, but it’s actually not coming together as a story. I can give you feedback that’s very, very specific, because with the sort of fixed/growth mindset dichotomy, giving you things that are changeable is what gives you an opportunity, it gives you an avenue to change your behavior. If I just said you need to try hard, what does that even mean? So I hope I’ve been underscoring the deliberateness of everything, everything, even from the way feedback is given, to how and why we set up exams in certain ways and how much we do. It’s all based on, again, this philosophy of teaching is a process.

Rebecca: I think we often use the word specific and say specific all the time, but you’ve just illustrated what you mean by specific, which is really helpful. So it’s really fun to talk, and we could talk forever and ever and ever, because there’s lots of fun things to talk about, and you’re teaching such interesting classes in interesting ways. But one thing we want to make sure we get to before we wrap up today is the asynchronous class that you’ve developed on inclusive teaching. Can you talk a little bit about this course and who the target audience is?

Bryan: Yeah, so this course was a collaboration between my program and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Biointeractive Program. It is based on a paper I wrote back in 2019 called “Deep Teaching in STEM.” The secret is that, yes, it says STEM because it went to a STEM journal, but the things we talk about in that paper really applies to all teaching. The other secret is that there’s nothing in that paper that’s particularly new. It’s just that we in STEM had ignored it for so long, and so perhaps that’s why we felt a need to re-center some of those ideas that, oh, by the way, it might be good to build relationships with your students and know who they are as people, and not just treat them as student ID numbers that need a grade. So that paper talked about five components that goes into what we call deep teaching, and those components then came to represent a module on that massive open online course. One of the key features of that course we wanted to really model was the very sort of introspective, spiritual, even soulful, way we think about teaching and we are asking listeners and participants in that course to be reflective. We wanted to model that in how the course itself was delivered. So we were very selective in who we asked to guest lecture, and the nine lectures are very, very long. We’ve infused at the end of each module. So there’s a main module, and there’s sort of four sub-modules that represent each component. Every main module, one of the sub-modules is an artistic piece. So we commissioned a painting. We had poetry, spoken word, even a Negro spiritual, and it was not random. They all thematically connected to what the module is talking about. And it was built in a Canvas shell, which is, as a MOOC, it’s free for anybody to access. But also what we’ve done is we’ve been working with a lot of universities who uploaded it onto their own Canvas shells and running faculty learning communities with a local facilitator going through the LMS. And the course has many practical, specific things. You want to think of a reflection in your course, here are some examples of prompts. So you want to have more transparency in your assignment, consider Mary-Ann Winkelmes’s framework. But what it also has, especially because of the nature of the way the course was set up, just a lot of moments for reflection. We didn’t want it to feel like a worksheet. You just go through this, do that. Go through this, do that. Like, when you hear somebody talk about motivation, like, think about when you were motivated, what made you motivated, and sit with that reflection, because that sort of empathetic approach is what really is going to make the course impactful for you. There are many 1000s of people who’ve just done it by themselves and have found a lot of meaning for it, but we’re really having a lot of fun seeing universities do it as a FLC on their campus. So that’s a nutshell. I think the web name is a little long for me to remember, but I know if you just Google inclusive teaching biointeractive, it should be the first thing that pops up.

John: And we’ll include a link to it in the show notes as well. I see that you have two books coming out in a little over the next year. Could you talk a little bit about those?

Bryan: Yeah, so it’s actually three, but one is not in the next year, right? So the two that I’m working on, one I’ve been collaborating with just a wonderful group, Peter Felton, Isis Artze-Vega, Dan Bergen, and Leo Lambert. Leo nd Peter wrote a book a few years ago called Relationship-Rich Education, which is just phenomenal, and that has led to a few follow ups. So we’re working on one of the follow ups to that project, so more details on that soon when that’s a bit further along. The other book, I’ve been collaborating with a colleague on campus. We’ve been interviewing people about telling personal stories, about times when they either felt a sense of belonging or have not felt a sense of belonging in STEM, and as somebody who comes from a storytelling background, from a literature background, the use of this discipline and this art form and this communication style, I think, is an underused approach in science in general, especially when you’re trying to convey something like that. And so I’m just very grateful for those people who’ve been willing to share their stories with us. So that will come on as an anthology, and, I guess dates TBD, but pretty excited about it.

Rebecca: Those both sound like really exciting projects. So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Bryan: Well, I would say what’s next, like my most sort of next next, so I’ve been part of a group, a Gates Foundation funded group that has worked pretty hard over the last couple of years doing a landscape analysis that trying to identify what are some of the things that institutions around the country are doing to do equity-minded practices, especially in the intro classes. And that landscape analysis incorporated a lot of things like document analysis, interviews, data mining, and things like that, and we are launching the findings of our analysis as a report on October 25 in Washington, DC, at FIU, in DC’s campus there. It’ll be a free report. Obviously, there’ll be a Zoom link for anybody who wants to attend, and the report will be made available on our website. And we’re pretty excited about it, because there just is a lot of institutions doing great things out there. And to this point, we hadn’t seen a place where those great things were just collated in one place. And the obvious next step from this project is to take those great practices and say, “Okay, now that we know what’s good and who’s doing it, and how it’s worked, where they were, can these things all simultaneously exist in one institution? Can we learn from all of these best practices and say, if we have a goal of success for all on our campus, this is a place where we can look to to get some real both like comprehensive but specific ideas on how to make that happen. So that’s October 25 and pretty excited for that launch.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

John: And we’re looking forward to hearing more about these books once they are ready to come out. Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again, and we look forward to more conversations in the future.

Bryan: John, it’s always a pleasure. Hopefully next time in Oswego.

John: That would be great. [LAUGHTER]

Bryan: Alright, man, thank you.

John: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you.

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

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

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357. Inclusive Socratic Teaching

Posted in classroom community, collaborative learning, diversity, equity, gender bias, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, social justice, support network, teaching
September 4, 2024

Socratic teaching is a primary pedagogical technique in American law school education. In this episode, Jamie Abrams joins us to discuss barriers this method can impose and strategies for a more inclusive approach to Socratic teaching.

Jamie is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Legal Rhetoric Program at the American University Washington College of Law.  She has published numerous books, chapters, and articles, including several on legal education pedagogy. Jamie is the recipient of teaching awards from Blackboard, the University of Louisville, and the American University Washington College of Law. She also co-founded the Brandeis Human Rights Advocacy Program at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law which works to advance the human rights of immigrants, refugees, and noncitizens.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Socratic teaching is a primary pedagogical technique in American law school education. In this episode, we discuss barriers this method can impose and strategies for a more inclusive approach to Socratic teaching.

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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 Jamie Abrams. Jamie is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Legal Rhetoric Program at the American University Washington College of Law. She has published numerous books, chapters, and articles, including several on legal education pedagogy. Jamie is the recipient of teaching awards from Blackboard, the University of Louisville, and the American University Washington College of Law. She also co-founded the Brandeis Human Rights Advocacy Program at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law which works to advance the human rights of immigrants, refugees, and noncitizens. Welcome, Jamie.

Jamie: Hello.

John: Our teas today are:… Jamie, are you drinking any tea?

Jamie: I am. I have a very simple green tea, but it’s in a special mug that one of my research assistants gave me that has a picture of the cover of a book I wrote and my research assistant worked on. So my tea is pretty basic, but my mug is pretty special.

John: And it’s on theme, because we will be talking about that book very shortly,

Rebecca: I have Scottish afternoon tea, despite the fact that we’re recording this in the morning. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have Lady Grey tea today.

Rebecca: That’s a good choice, John. We invited you here today, Jamie, to talk about your most recent book, the one that’s on the mug, Inclusive Socratic Teaching: Why Law Schools Need It and How to Achieve It. Socratic teaching has long been a hallmark of legal education. Why has there been such a high level of curricular conformity in legal education?

Jamie: Yeah, it’s really kind of shocking, right? If we think for a second about what lawyers do. We hire lawyers to be innovators, problem solvers, creative thinkers, storytellers. So the idea that we educate in such a lockstep way is really kind of befuddling to me. You would think that schools, especially in a competitive market packed in fighting for these students, would find ways to differentiate. So I think personally, the US News and the larger than life role that the rankings processes have played over the years is one piece of the story. I also think it’s a lot of mimicry. So I became a law professor, and I started teaching how my law professors taught me, who were teaching how their law professors taught them. And also, I think there’s very little incentive to innovate. You have to sort of cross a certain threshold and be a quality and strong teacher, but at the end of the day, most of the incentives in academia generally, are skewed toward publication and other things, and there’s not a lot of incentive within our institutions. There’s no one to tell that you’ve innovated. There’s no one celebrating it or putting it on the website, but they’ll put your book on the website, and they’ll put your publications on the website. But I do think it’s ironic that the Socratic method was innovative at one point, that it was revolutionary to legal education, and now 100 years later, I’m not sure we can call it revolutionary anymore.

John: What is some of the harm done by this focus on Socratic teaching?

Jamie: Yeah.So first, let me just define Socratic teaching, just to make sure. So folks might define it different ways, but it’s typically a large lecture hall full of students, one professor situated at the front, and that Professor holds all of the power and engages in sort of serial Q and A with one student, than another, than another. So it might last the whole class with one student, some professors might do cold calls, where everyone in the room is sitting there scared, waiting to be on call, or others might take volunteers. And so this method of teaching is very distinct to legal education, and it has wielded the exact same criticisms, frankly, for 50 years, criticism that it marginalizes some voices and magnifies others. If you think about a classroom design, that’s literally true, like certain voices just carry dominantly on those microphones in our classrooms, others are harder to pick up, harder to hear. There are quantitative studies going all the way back to the 90s that male students, and white male students particularly, are much more comfortable engaging in this sort of intellectual sparring with the professor and other students might find that culturally dissonant to the way they would engage with the professor. It can be very abstract, sort of talking in the air about what the law is, which can cause students to sort of leave their identities at the door. We sort of pretend that the law is neutral, and while people in the room have been harmed by some of the legal rules that we’re teaching, and we don’t often acknowledge that, or we leave those students to raise the critiques directly. So those are some of the most concrete harms. But the other thing I would just briefly mention, those are the harms that I think are sourced to the Socratic method of teaching, this abstract perspectivelessness, sort of marginalizing hierarchy. But the thing that I’ve wrestled with in my work is: what are we protecting here? Are the rest of the students just thriving and loving this method of teaching? And that’s where I think it’s important to note that we have a real wellness crisis, in general, in legal education and the practice of law, with one in 10 students reporting self harm, one in six students with clinically diagnosed depression, one in four students with alcohol dependence. And so I sort of look at that data and like, “What are we protecting here? Why are we so afraid to innovate or try something new?”

Rebecca: Law school student bodies have also become more diverse. Has legal education evolved to support these more diverse student populations? It’s sounding like it’s not.

Jamie: It really is not, or the way that I describe it is we’re innovating around the curricular core. So it’s like we’ve bought a house and we’re doing beautiful renovations to closets and third floors and guest rooms, but we’re leaving the kitchen and the living room, where people spend the bulk of their time, untouched, and so we have beautifully more diverse student bodies, faculties, and our communities. But honestly, most of the reforms that have happened along with the diversification of who’s studying law have been more structural and less curricular. So we’ve popped up all of these support mechanisms, mentoring programs, pipeline programs, scholarships, affinity organizations, academic success programming, named chairs and all of these things are helpful. They provide structural support, but again, those are really incremental supports that risk giving the message to students that students are the problem, not the pedagogy. It’s saying, “Well, if any students are not thriving in this pedagogy, we’ll hire all these people to help support you through it,” instead of maybe reflecting that maybe the pedagogy isn’t working for everybody. So those kinds of support systems are helpful, but they’re sort of more harm reduction than transformation, and so our curriculums have not changed dramatically, other than seminars and ad hoc things like that.

John: Going back to the pedagogy a bit, one of the things that has been emphasized quite a bit in terms of inclusive teaching more broadly, is the importance of low-stakes formative assessments. But it sounds as if that has not been the norm in at least the core curriculum in law schools. Could you talk a little bit about how assessment takes place and what type of feedback students get in their core courses?

Jamie: Yeah, and one of the reasons I’m so excited to be on your podcast is legal education is so far behind other fields in pedagogical transformations. And so just about 10 years ago, we moved to outcomes-based assessment, frankly, pretty begrudgingly and reluctantly, but the accreditation bodies moved us in that direction, and most folks did it kind of superficially. We’ve added some learning outcomes to our course, and that was about it. So a typical law school course marches through 14 weeks of these sort of high anxiety, intellectual sparring with your professor, and then it historically culminated in a one time only three- or four-hour exam where you sit and that’s it, and you may not ever get that exam back. You’ll get your grade, you will move on, and from that professor, you’re unlikely to be able to get too much feedback, maybe a sample answer, or maybe a little bit of a summary of what your professor was looking for. But along the way, this outcomes-based education comes along, and frankly, most law faculty adapted very simply by just moving that summative exam that was so stressful and opaque and anxiety producing from the end and then plopped a midterm in October or March that does the exact same thing. It’s just as opaque, it’s just as stressful, it’s just worth less. But we’ve not really adapted in very thoughtful ways to do more no-stakes, low-stakes assessment, or to really help students see an arc, like a course of development of how the Socratic method fits into any of this. Is this a form of assessment, or is it just a method of teaching? I don’t think we’re clear for ourselves what the heck we’re doing with this method of teaching.

Rebecca: So as you brought in more diverse students, and the pedagogy hasn’t changed, and you have these supports here,[LAUGHTER] and that you’ve talked about some things kind of changing along the margins. Has the curriculum changed around the margins? Is that where some of the change has happened?

Jamie: So there’s a lot more dynamic programming. We have many more seminars and interesting named chairs and folks in our institutions who are institutional experts. But that being said, like a typical course in contracts or tort law or civil procedure still looks pretty much the same. The book I use, for example, is on it’s like 15th edition. It’s been around for 80 something years, and so how has it adapted? It shoves some more notes in to offer some more diverse perspectives, maybe eliminating some of the masculinized language or the racialized language in a practice problem or a hypothetical students are wrestling with. So I would say that, generally speaking, our teaching has become less problematic. But that’s not the same as becoming inclusive or excellent.

John: And in your book, you also talk a little bit of how the curriculum reflects the dominant culture, which doesn’t bring in a lot of voices, just by the nature of the curriculum with existing case law. What perhaps should be done to bring in more voices so that the curriculum better connects to the more diverse student body?

Jamie: Yeah. So I think reimagining a Socratic classroom around clients, around skills, and around communities could go a long way. So the one thing that Socratic classrooms offer that is beneficial is repetition, which is very helpful for students learning a new skill. And every class, every time they walk in, they’re going to start with one case, then a second case, then a third case, and they’re going to do that in all of their classes. So there actually is a lot of repetition happening. So what if instead we transformed that repetition into beginning with a client who called a lawyer. Why did they call a lawyer? What did they want? What had happened to that person? What did the law say when the lawyer first researched the law and did that answer the client’s problem, or did it not? And in most of our cases, it didn’t, and so they had to go to court. So there’s just so much more we could do to pull the exact same materials, the exact same law that we’re studying, and pull it down into communities. Like, how is this actually affecting people? And if you think about it, we’re packing classrooms. I have 88 people in my class that starts next week. There’s so many perspectives in that class. There’s going to be international students, students from rural America, from urban America, students from every geography in the country, like there’s so many great moments to just hear from that. But so this serial, I’m going to talk to student one, then student two, then student three, we’re missing all of the great opportunity to bring in. So there’s this famous movie, The Paper Chase. And in this movie, the professor is a legendary Socratic professor, and he says, “You came to me with a brain full of mush, and then I’m going to turn you into a lawyer.” And I think that that mentality, certainly less toxic today, but there’s still this idea that we need to eliminate, eradicate, this idea that our students come with a, quote, “brain full of mush,” and every year we have a room of 88 people from all over who’ve lived different experiences, who are going to read this exact same material and think about it differently, and our classrooms could be so much more engaging and different every semester, and more student centered if we start to embrace that instead of sticking with this serial case participation.

John: And I do have to say, as I was reading your book, I kept seeing John Houseman, both in the movie [LAUGHTER] and in the TV series. A brilliant actor.

Jamie: I think he won an Oscar for it,

John: I believe so, yeah.

Jamie: I have mad respect for anyone role playing a law professor who could win an Oscar. That’s impressive.

John: But I think that series did reflect some of the stress and anxiety that that method of teaching created for the students.

Jamie: Absolutely, there’s this famous scene. I can’t remember where it falls in the movie, but a group of these all white male students get a hotel room, and they lock themselves in, and they take the TV out, and they’re just spiraling into madness as they’re studying for the exam, and they’re talking about murder on the inside, such that the housekeeping staff ultimately gets suspicious of what’s going on in there. But it depicts everything of the toxicity. It certainly doesn’t look nothing like that anymore. But that the same idea of just this brain full of mush and then this frenzied push to an all in exam is certainly still there.

Rebecca: I think, whether you’re in a traditional kind of law faculty or in a different kind of department that still embraces traditional practices, no matter your discipline, introducing more inclusive practices can be daunting, can be hard. What do you see as some of the first steps to make some change? Is it something that you do as an individual? Is it something that you start to do and try to make a departmental change? How did the seeds of change happen, do you think?

Jamie: Yeah, one of the things that I think is a first problem to be addressed is we actually don’t have a community of teachers who teach in this way. And that’s actually kind of surprising. At least in legal education, there are robust communities of folks who teach legal writing, for example, that’s one of my areas of expertise. And we have conferences, we have newsletters, we have our own journals about pedagogy. We have idea banks, we have listservs where we share ideas. And that happens in clinical education. And so here, this is sort of like a rogue industry of Socratic teachers, sort of working as independent contractors, doing their own thing. You walk into a law clinic, whether it’s serving veterans in a private school, in a rural setting, or whether it’s doing housing cases in Manhattan, there’s a certain pedagogy and there’s a certain set of values that drive the work that these clinical classrooms are engaging in. And so I think one huge part of this is we need to build some community for those folks. There are 1000s of law professors, and more than that. My daughter is in AP gov and did a Socratic seminar as part of her coursework as well. And we’re exporting it around the world. A lot of law schools are trying to design themselves in an American tradition. And so I think one huge step is community building and figuring out how we can share ideas and have a sense of identity among Socratic teachers. So I think that’s a big part. Second, I think we also have a huge problem in academia generally, where we bifurcate staff and faculty roles, and so we have staff in our institutions who are working daily with students struggling through our classes, struggling through the bar, struggling through job placement, and then we have faculty just marching on doing their thing, and there’s very little information sharing about what kind of shared experiences, because it can depersonalize it. It’s not my classroom that’s a problem. But if we could hear our students in general are struggling with cold calling, with too much reading, with general anxiety, and we could start to be thinking much more as a community. And then finally, I think one of the big issues is this Socratic classroom props up the entire structure of time management for faculty, specifically. So I’m coming off my summer. I get back to teaching next week. And if I’m being honest, I probably spent 90% of my summer working on scholarship, and 10% working on teaching. And even the teaching, I wouldn’t really say, is working on teaching, it’s working on just rebooting the administrative components of it, updating my syllabus, getting my course learning management site up. It’s not teaching. I’m not transforming, I’m not redesigning, I’m not innovating, I’m marching forward. And I use my summers to do scholarship. And so I think for folks who are interested in innovating, we have to make some space for it so that others can follow.

John: There’s been a variety of critical approaches critiquing legal education. Have they had much of an impact?

Jamie: We have 50 years of scholars across a robust group of adjacent fields of scholarship, from feminist legal theory to critical race theory to LatCrit to queer theory. All of these critical perspectives have different methodologies, different agendas, and the one thing they all align on is naming the critiques of the Socratic method. And so I think, if I’m being reflective, these scholarly communities have had huge effects in building out that seminar programming, making more diverse hiring, and in the law itself, like how we think about what the law should be and scholarship, but at the end of the day, inside of the curriculum, I think the change has been a little bit more incremental, a little bit more add on. And so that’s kind of stressful for students too, to just shove in some extra readings here and there, but it’s not integrated in the book, and it sort of feels tangential or ad hoc. So I don’t think we’ve done a lot. Again, we’ve kind of done it around the core, and there’s great things happening. But I personally think that every person about to enter the legal profession should be thinking about it in more inclusive ways, of how the law affects communities. And just bluntly, every law is an expression of power, and somebody is going to benefit from that law, and someone is going to be harmed by it. And so it should be a part of training lawyers, not just seminar enrollment with your electives.

Rebecca: It’s really powerful just to just even think about that. I’m thinking about what you were saying about needing to shift from a 90/10 to a different kind of percentage, and how you start to make that shift if you also need to start forming community when a community doesn’t actually currently exist, because some of that time would need to be allocated to the community too. So it’s not as clean as a 90/10.

Jamie: That’s exactly right. And so, for example, I’m really excited since this book came out, I’ve done a couple of talks with faculty. Teaching is so vulnerable. Reading course evaluations, you have to be in the right mental space to open those. It’s hard, it’s searing, it’s vulnerable, just like our students’ experience when they open our feedback on their essays and their exams. And so I think here, if it feels like an attack and someone saying your teaching is outdated or your teaching is too traditional, it shuts people down. But if instead, we could bring in a speaker and look at a script of a typical Socratic dialog: what were the facts of the case, what was the holding of the case, what was the issue in the case, and critique it. That’s pretty darn abstract. It actually is abstract. How could we reframe this? And then the legal writing faculty in the room and the clinical faculty might say, “Why don’t you ask who hired a lawyer and why? Because those are the people who walk into our clinic.” And then the legal writing, people might say, “Why don’t you ask what legal sources that lawyer found when they researched on behalf of their client?” And so I think there are just cool ways within our faculty where we can all be learning from each other, but it does, I think, have to be a bit community based, otherwise it just feels too personal. And so one of the things I talk about in the book is this kind of paradoxical opportunity that COVID created, because the very idea that 180 something law schools and all of these faculties, in a flip of a switch, changed how they taught, and it wasn’t right, it was frenzied and it was flawed, but it was necessary, and we did it. And so, similarly, I think here, if it feels less personal, and it feels like we have to do this for our students, because one in 10 of our students is engaging in self harm, and one in four has alcohol dependence, like we can make some changes. I think we feel like we’re doing something together, instead of feeling like we’re attacked by someone critiquing our teaching.

John: You advocate inclusive Socratic teaching, so you’re not suggesting that Socratic teaching be eliminated. What aspects of Socratic teaching would be kept? What are the benefits of it that you’d like to see persisting?

Jamie: Yeah, and first I should say advocating might be a strong word for keeping Socratic method. I think I just approach it from sheer pragmatism… that change, you can’t bludgeon change. Change is hard. Faculties are not the most change oriented groups of people. The critiques are fair, and I think people actually agree with those critiques, but I do not think that the critical mass is there ready to upend the Socratic classroom and reimagine legal education. And so I sort of start from that premise and then say, “Okay, well, what could we do within this?” And so I kind of pitch my thinking on this as we should keep blowing the roof off of legal education, reimagining how we think about teaching. But while we’re doing that, which takes some time, we have to raise the floor and just raise our standards. So the things that I suggest are that we come up with a set of shared pedagogies that shape a Socratic classroom, and I propose that those frame Socratic teaching around techniques that are student centered, skill centered, client centered and community centered. And so my thinking with that is changing books is hard, changing testing techniques is hard, changing your teaching notes is hard, but if we could just reframe our existing dialogs using our existing materials, I think we could go a long way to diffusing that power role that the professor plays at the front. And frankly, it’s kind of liberating to hand a lot of power to the students. It takes pressure off the professor. It’s not this intellectual sparring, it’s a community of soon to be lawyers working together to talk about cases and what happened. And so I think it’s just a much more achievable method of reform. But in bulk, given how much of the time our students spend in these courses, I think the results could be transformative.

Rebecca: It seems like one of the key things that you’re promoting is the idea of the connectedness, that it’s not abstract, and that it’s connected to each individual, and that there’s a way for them to see how it would impact their lives, or the lives of their individual communities, or the communities that they’re a part of.

Jamie: Yeah. And I think the wealth of scholars who are writing about wellness in the profession are really great on this topic, which is, if we were to try to source where is this depression coming from… what’s happening? Law students enter legal education with similar levels of happiness and healthiness to their similarly situated peers, and then something’s happening in that first year. And I think that’s exactly what it is. It is the loss of community. Students are afraid to come into office hours, that someone else might hear their questions. And it varies at different schools how competitive and how individualistic the pursuit is, but when I think about my time practicing law, it was not individualistic at all. It’s sitting in a conference room hashing out ideas, throwing out ideas, brainstorming what to do, coming up with a plan B and a Plan C and a Plan D, and teams of lawyers thinking things through and the study of law is a lot of holeing yourself up in the library and just grinding it out, and maybe you might look to the people to your right and left as your competition. Certainly we need to do a lot more to help see that these are your future collaborators and colleagues, and you’re joining a profession that is a community, and you’ll rely on them much more in your practice than law school gives the impression of.

John: So shifting to more teamwork and collaborative work would be part of this revision. What other changes would you like to see in terms of how classrooms are functioning in a more inclusive approach?

Jamie: I would say, first, we need to be transparent with our students. If we’re using the Socratic method, why? What is happening, and it’s very opaque. So for example, if I were to propose one change to the most cynical or incrementalist of teachers who’s sort of skeptically considering this. Very simply, just tell your students what you’re doing with the Socratic method. Why are you using it? How does it prepare you for the exam? How does it prepare you for lawyering or the bar exam? What is it doing? And that can just be helpful. That’s a first step. Second. I think it’s helpful to start to think about pulling out of our Socratic methods. More clients, community, and skills. And then third, I think we have to tether this to a repackaging of our exam strategies as well. So what we’re doing in the classroom should be a form of no-stakes, low-stakes readiness for what you’re going to ask students to do on the exam. And so similarly, if we can start to ground our exams in more purposeful. So many of our exams are very abstract. You’ll give students a bunch of things that happen. I teach tort law with like personal injuries. So there’s a car accident, and then someone on those college campus scooters leaves it, and someone trips on it, and all sorts of sort of parade of horribles happening. And then we say: analyze. But who’s our client? Who’s paying us? What’s our mission? What was our community? Where did this happen? We could just do more to align what we’re doing in the classroom with these exams. And I think a lot of that aligns with where legal education is heading anyway, which is toward more professional identity formation, more development of cultural competencies. And so I think this, it can fulfill a lot of pedagogical objectives.

Rebecca: I hinted towards this a little bit earlier, about there’s individual things you can do to start to form community around you, or to connect with people who might be interested [LAUGHTER] in pursuing some of these things as well. Those individuals may not be your colleagues within your department. They may be other folks that you’ve met at conferences. How do you start nudging the people around you, maybe, who need the nudging? [LAUGHTER]

Jamie: Yeah, absolutely, I think it’s important to note that Socratic teaching in its traditional form is really hard on teachers too. We’ve talked about how it’s hard on students, but I look back on my early years of teaching, and it is a constant debilitating fear that your students are going to catch you in something you don’t know, or a mistake you made, and that’s just an unrealistic set of expectations. I practiced law. I was a talented lawyer. I’m a talented professor, but I still know only a fraction of the material that I’m teaching. There’s still room to learn. There’s still cases I never had and areas I never practiced in. And so it’s a very stress inducing experience for the professor, too, and particularly the new professor. And so over time, it becomes very sustainable, but at the beginning, it’s actually debilitatingly terrifying,[LAUGHTER] and especially it’s because of that intellectual sparring vibe. You can picture the student who’s like, mission in life is to outspar their professor, and so, that’s just a terrible approach to learning in general. And so I think a little bit of this, more experience sharing of how teaching can be more engaging, right? I teach the same courses every single year, but if we’re teaching in more student-centered, community-centered ways, our students are changing dramatically, how they think about the world, how they think about learning, our communities are changing dramatically, and our communities are, frankly, more polarized and divisive than ever. And so what are we going to do about that? So for tort law, for example, we’re going to go to a jury. Which kind of jury in COVID Are you going to get? The jury that COVID is not serious, or the jury where COVID has the whole community on lockdown? It’s a totally different set of values and norms driving a community. And so I think that it can just be such a more engaging way to teach if we open up the idea that our students are going to engage with the material in different ways every year, and it also takes the professor out of it, like I try to teach in inclusive Socratic techniques, and one of the things that I think is the biggest benefit of what I try to do is I don’t have a line out my door at exam time of panicked students. I do review sessions, and people come to office hours throughout, but if you’re more transparent with your students about what you expect of them and if they know how you’re going to test them at the end, and if every class is a chance to practice that over and over, it also takes a little bit of this tension out of the grades that I give and the conversations that you have with students around exam time, they can start to support themselves. You can start to transfer. They can study in groups and take practice problems together. And so in some respects, I think it’s less fatiguing and it feels less high stakes, because I can’t have all the answers. I have my lived experience. But when someone else engages on a topic in the class, the other folks in the class might have a dramatically better answer than I ever could have thought of. So I think just being a little bit more vulnerable and raw in like talking to each other about what Socratic teaching is actually like, especially in these first years, and I should mention especially for women professors and professors of color, because we have this image and this bias in our head of what a law professor looks like. And so if you stand there with a quieter voice, a smaller frame, if your voice doesn’t carry in the same way across the classroom, if you’re a person of color, there’s great series of talking about presumptions of competence, and how students on bulk don’t give a presumption of competence to their professors of color. And then you imagine that intellectual sparring and what that’s like when you have someone who looks like what you thought your law professor would look like, and someone who doesn’t. It’s a dramatically different experience. And so that was a very long answer, but building community and more honesty about what teaching in this tradition feels like.

Rebecca: So I feel like you might have some folks who might just say, “but Jamie, I’ve got my habits and I’m tired [LAUGHTER]…

Jamie: Yes, yes. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: …and I don’t wanna,” but I feel like those same folks might buy in if you say it’s really important for the new people, or for the diversification of the field, to make a little bit of room for these new folks and to establish some of these other kinds of patterns so they don’t get the pushback, and that they don’t have some of this stress. A lot of times, I think some of our seasoned faculty actually are really willing to budge a little bit so that some of the people that they really want to see succeed can, if they understand why those people can’t succeed. Sometimes you have to be really explicit about why they can’t succeed though, they just don’t get it.

Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I think is important too, is, despite everything we’ve talked about in our time together, about the critiques and the harms, course evals are great for these professors, right? Like these are beloved professors. They’re revered, people aspire to be in their classrooms. There is tremendous peer pressure in teaching to conform. So one of the things I talk about in the book is, at a minimum, we just need to stop putting Socratic teaching on a pedestal and making it immune from accountability, even if you don’t want to change. Just stop pretending that your classroom is the default, and just make space that there could be other classrooms. And because what’s happening is anyone who wants to try to innovate or approach it in a different way is going to be evaluated by folks teaching in that traditional perspective. So there’s some room for academic deans to give some structure to what are we doing when we do peer evaluations, it’s not mimicry and conformity, like we should have some objective criteria that could be fulfilled in any number of teaching techniques, but there’s a lot of just this conformity. And so I think making some space to liberate peer evaluations, to rethink the questions we ask on our course evaluations, like the dominant questions on a law school course: “Was your professor knowledgeable? Was your professor available? Did your professor handle difficult topics well?” It’s all Professor centered, instead of, “Did you feel welcome in the classroom? Did you have the tools you needed to succeed?” Even our questions could be more student centered to start to measure things from the student perspective instead of let’s just assess whether you thought your professor was smart enough, which is an incredibly narrow and subjective and infused with bias way to approach it.

Rebecca: You mean like a question, like, “Did you receive feedback throughout the semester?”

Jamie: [LAUGHTER] That’s a great question. That would be a great question. One quick anecdote I would love to mention. As I was working on this book, I had the chance to present… every year, there is a new law professors conference that takes place in Washington, DC, run by the American Association of Law Schools. And so, I don’t know, maybe 150, 200 people come. These are the new hires. They’re entering. They’re going into academia all over the country. First of all, as a slight aside, everyone calls it the baby law profs, which already tells you that we are not embracing the idea that new people come in with new ideas. But anyway, putting that aside, I got the chance to do a session on the Socratic method there, and I would describe it as pretty raw, because in that room are people who want to change, like they’re at that moment, and they’re actually at a conference that’s doing some of the assimilation, and saying, “Let me teach you how to teach in the Socratic method,” like, “let me teach you how to handle exam writing.” And so that kind of tells you that there’s just this assimilation process, and on the topic of the Socratic method, it was quite raw, because many of those faculty, they’ve been in practice, and they see the flaws of it, they see the limitations of it, and they’re excited to innovate. And then slowly, we kind of dull that instinct and start to channel toward conformity in a way that I think is really problematic. That’s a great place where we could start. And let’s open it up, let’s hear from innovators. Who’s not teaching in a Socratic method? Let’s get them in front of these students and these new law professors, and let’s get a more diverse panel of what other techniques folks are using, what’s working, what’s not.

John: Following up with that issue of diversity, in your book, and you alluded to this just a few minutes ago, there seem to be some pretty substantial gender inequities in terms of legal instruction. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. And I honestly would love to talk about it a little bit more from the perspective of personal narrative, because I think that will tell the story quite representatively. So I’ve been in teaching for 17 years. I have two children, and I’ve had zero maternity leaves. One I was lucky enough to have in June, and so it worked out. The second was born in September… didn’t work out… and I kept teaching through that semester. I was a term faculty member, as many women faculty are, so I was not full time, not eligible for FMLA, and I hadn’t been there for a year. And I remember talking to my academic dean. I remember coming home and being like, “he’s gonna let me teach.” And I was so grateful that I was gonna be allowed to come in after giving birth and keep teaching. And I look back on that, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, there are so many layers of problems with that….” that I actually sincerely felt that, and that I was so grateful to just have a job through that. And so anyways, so I was in legal writing, which is dominated by women, as is clinical faculty, and really limited in its opportunities for tenure-track positions. And so I ultimately went on the tenure track, and you have to be geographically mobile often to do that. And so that landed me in the middle of Kentucky, in Louisville, Kentucky, from Manhattan, and my spouse was a financial services guy working in Manhattan, and somehow did not seem as excited about Louisville, Kentucky’s financial services market as I was, and so we ended up living there 10 years, and seven of them he commuted. Seven years of solo parenting. And like when you start to add that up, schools get out at three o’clock. You get the kids on the bus, you get to school. How many conferences is that? How many more papers could you have published? How many more networking dinners and Bar Association events or award if I were able to be a full time… I was a full-time professor, but solo parenting, just to have a job, not to rise in the job or thrive in the job, but just to call myself a professor. Quite candidly, it nearly destroyed our family. Seven years of commuting is financially taxing, it’s emotionally taxing, it’s very hard on relationships, and that experience is so typical. I could name dozens and dozens. We are not great at spousal hiring. We’re not great at childcare. We’ve got lots of issues and just lots of stunted opportunities. And then the last thing I’ll say is all those things we talked about, the mentoring, the support programs, the affinity groups, those are often led by women and professors of color. And so there’s a piece of legal scholarship that I really like that says the women professors do the housekeeping at home and the housekeeping institutionally. And so women faculty and faculty of color doing disproportionate amounts of service, particularly the kind of service that isn’t really counted very well. Certain kinds of service are quite well distinguished and coveted, but mentoring students can kind of fall off the grid, and being the person that people just come to for support is not really tracked, but that’s time lost. So those are some of my personal experiences with it. I think the most raw example of it is I will never forget the day I found out I was awarded tenure. We had multiple days of the meetings, and so I didn’t know which day would be the day my package would be considered, but the day we found out my spouse was out of town, and there’s a tradition of a champagne toast at the end for folks who were just awarded tenure. And I couldn’t be there for the champagne toast because I had to go home, and then I went home to solo parenting, and I just remember I was very upset about it, and I just remember feeling like that’s the stuff, that community and that I was there and I was thriving, but I was not able to engage in the ways that we would want our faculty to under those circumstances. That was a raw, dark note to end on.

Rebecca: Those are the realities, I think, of a lot of complexities of higher ed that we’re still trying to untangle.

Jamie: And I think the thing that excited me so much about you inviting me to join the podcast is we don’t talk very much across schools. We don’t talk across fields. And legal education is pretty darn far behind. We have a lot to learn from peers, if we’re open to it. And so I think that these struggles are not unique to legal education, and other fields and areas are much more ahead of us. And so if we could just open our minds to more learning,= 360 from those around us.

John: And your book should help contribute to that, at least in the legal profession.

Jamie: I hope so. My favorite thing to do with the book is do faculty presentations that are conversations where, similarly, where I begin with the presentation, and then I’m out of it, right? Just like I’m describing we should be doing in our classrooms, where, what’s happening at your school, what could you be doing? And it’s a really rewarding feeling to see faculty talking among themselves about pedagogy and not being talked at.

Rebecca: …sounds like a great place to get to our last question, which is: we always end by asking, what’s next?

Jamie: Well, I think if I were talking to colleagues listening who are teaching in the Socratic tradition, I would say, start with something. We often set such high goals for ourselves that it feels like too much. Just pick a couple of things, the transparency, try a different method of assessment, or talk to your colleagues about what methods of assessment might be more helpful to give feedback to students. My first message would be to start with just a couple of things and just see how it feels. We don’t need to rewrite our books or rewrite our syllabi, but I also think there’s a lot of institutional work that needs to be done. I think this grassroots and this coalition of the willing is one strategy. But also, I would love to see more leadership at the top of academic deans and institutional structures, just doing a little bit more. Like, what if we promoted in our marketing some of our great teachers? What if we could do some spotlighting on students talking about what they love about their great teachers. I think there’s a little more we could be doing to create a culture that values innovation in teaching. Lots of our teaching awards are kind of popularity contests. What if we had awards for innovation, where we start to incentivize in that direction? And so I think institutionally, there’s a lot of work we could do to start to set the tone at the top that this is something that actually matters, and we can actually differentiate in the kind of pedagogy we’re delivering.

Rebecca: Well, I hope your book sparks some great change in the spaces that you want the change to happen.

Jamie: Thank you so much. Conversation about teaching, I think, is the answer to the beginning of all of this. So I’m so grateful to be on this podcast and to see the work you all are doing in bringing folks together from various fields and traditions, and it’s really inspiring.

John: Well, thank you. I really enjoyed reading your book. It’s an area that we had not really talked about before, and it sounds like it’s an area where there could be some very productive changes made.

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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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355. Class Dismissed

Posted in access, diversity, engagement, equity, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, income inequality, learning, race, racism, social justice, support network, teaching
August 21, 2024

Institutional racism in the form of redlining and unequal access to educational and housing opportunities have left generations of students without equitable access to higher education. In this episode, Anthony Abraham Jack joins us to discuss the challenges that first-gen students face and what colleges and faculty can do to reduce these inequities.

Tony is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Boston University Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University. Tony’s research has appeared in numerous scholarly publications and he is the recipient of numerous awards from the American Sociological Association, American Educational Studies Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He is the author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students and Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Institutional racism in the form of redlining and unequal access to educational and housing opportunities have left generations of students without equitable access to higher education. In this episode, we examine the challenges that first-gen students face and what colleges and faculty can do to reduce these inequities.

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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 Anthony Abraham Jack. He is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Boston University Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University. Tony’s research has appeared in numerous scholarly publications and he is the recipient of numerous awards from the American Sociological Association, American Educational Studies Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He is the author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. His new book, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price is scheduled for release in August. Welcome Tony.

Tony: Hi. Thank you all for having me.

John: Our teas today are:… Tony, are you drinking tea?

Tony: I’m actually drinking water, but I was actually thinking about going to get the Bengal spice tea that’s in my cabinet right now.

Rebecca: That sounds yummy, maybe afterwards, huh?

Tony: Indeed.

Rebecca: I have a new tea John that I got when I was in Scotland. So this is a 1903 blend from Pekoe Tea Edinburgh.

John: Wow. Yeah, I saw some of the photos from your world tour there while I’ve been in the classroom here, so just rub it in a little bit.

Rebecca: I’m trying. [LAUGHTER]

John: …and I am drinking an Irish Breakfast tea..

Rebecca: that’s on theme

John: …from Wegmans [LAUGHTER] here in Durham, North Carolina.

Rebecca: So, Tony, we invited you here today to discuss your forthcoming book, Class Dismissed. But first, maybe it’d be helpful if you tell us a little bit about your own educational journey.

Tony: There are two things that I always share about getting to this spot of being an educator and being an academic is: I’m a head start kid and I’m a first generation college student. Those two things are central to who I am and the work that I do. If it were not for Head Start, I would have a very different educational trajectory. Head Start put me in a school across the tracks, literally, in Miami. I went to a school that I wasn’t zoned for, because that dividing line that was McDonald’s Street. I was supposed to go to that dividing line of McDonald’s separated West Grove from Coconut Grove, where the Bahamian settlers were who cleaned up behind the white, wealthier families that live on the other side, and the schools were night and day in many respects, from the resources that they had, even class sizes were a little bit different. It was just a very different place. And what’s interesting is, if you were to come to my office right now, I actually have a map of Coconut Grove, and it literally says Coconut Grove Negro district, and on this official city map, you actually see the line that was drawn by city officials to say where black people could and could not live. That was fundamental. Head Start, it didn’t remove me from that history, but it didn’t make me travel the same path that that history would force me to any other way. And I’m a first-generation college student. I’m the son of a security guard. My mom actually helped segregate her middle school that she then worked at for 31 years as a school monitor, and my brother is a janitor who actually works at my old elementary school. No one in my family extended learning beyond college, but they made it possible through everything that life could throw at us, that made it possible for me to go to college, and those two things fundamentally shape who I am. As a Head Start kid, I can’t help but think about being from Coconut Grove. Every city in America has their Del Mar divide, that street that separates the richest and the poorest. Thinking about like it is in St Louis, I live very close to ours, and my education trajectory looks very different from everybody else who I went to school with. So many people who I live next to had a very different trajectory. So those two things really speak. And I was very fortunate to end up at Amherst College for undergrad, and then I came over to Harvard University to pursue my PhD. And to be honest with you, I haven’t left school yet. Since the moment I entered through Head Start, I have not left school. It’s been a lifelong dream to be a forever student, and I’m living it.

Rebecca: I’m living that lifelong student trajectory as well. [LAUGHTER]

John: Me too. The history of redlining and dividing districts and federal funding and loan availability in terms of those redlined districts, which weren’t always labeled that way, but they were still treated that way in terms of the availability of FHA loans and so forth…

Tony: Exactly.

John: …for a remarkably Long time, led to some horrible inequalities in terms of school financing.

Tony: Yeah, how the United States did policy for transportation. When you think about I-95 they literally drove highways through neighborhoods and say, “Okay, black people live over here, white people can live over here”. Even, how we handled the GI Bill, even though it was supposed to be one of the most universal policies. One, it wasn’t universal because so many women were not available for it, and then yet, the racialization of it was also a major aspect. So yeah, between redlining and blockbusting. So actions that real estate agents would say they would purposely introduce a black family in a neighborhood selling a house at like 125% of its value. But then when those whites who did not want to have a black neighbor, they were quick to sell and leave, and neighborhoods began going from all white to all black in that very short period of time. And you think about the resources that left because of income differences and segregation, weighed down by racism with income, I was removed from some of that, because Head Start placed me at Coconut Grove Elementary, and the principal there, Don Beebe, said he gets to stay. Not everybody had that opportunity.

John: And you talked about some of this in The Privileged Poor, where you talked about some of the inequities in colleges based on the amount of privilege that students had. Could you talk a little bit about the thesis of that to help set the stage for your more recent book?

Tony: Yeah, The Privileged Poor came about because of two things, and very much personal experience, but in two ways, experiential personal experience, how I experienced as a student, but it also what I had to grapple with as a graduate student, because as a student, I was trying to figure out what was going on when I got to Amherst, because so many people had gone to boarding school like Andover and Exeter and Saint Paul, or these really, really ritzy prep schools like Hackaday and Sidwell Friends and Nightingale I had graduated from a prep school in Miami, but from Head Start to 11th grade, I was a public school student. I had a football coach who liked athlete students but didn’t like student athletes, and so I transferred schools my senior year because I didn’t want to be under that kind of regime. And then Amherst called that football coach and said, “Hey, do you got a student who can pass our test?” He said, “Yeah, we got a kid this year,” and the rest was kind of history. The reason why I tell that story is because when I got to Amherst, I discovered that my individual detour through a private school was actually a well established on-ramp to elite colleges because of programs like Prep for Prep, A Better Chance, the Wight Foundation (W, I, G, H, T), and all these other programs that place lower income and sometimes lower income students of color into boarding day and preparatory high schools. So I’m like, “Okay, this is different.” This is people come from all over the place. It’s not just the rich people who are coming from these ritz y places. But then I got to graduate school, and as a sociologist, I’m reading about these inequalities and cultural inequality and race and all that stuff, but no one who’s writing about education is speaking about these students. They kept speaking about students as a monolithic group, really like they were painting with one brush stroke, and I was like, “Well, they got half the story right.” A lot of the people who I knew did struggle with isolation and difference and culture shock, but the other half of students, roughly, did not, like I had friends who studied abroad in high school for a year. I had friends who had flown on private jets. I had friends who had experiences that I only saw on movies and TV shows, like Gossip Girl. And so I put my experience as an undergrad in conversation with what I was learning as a graduate student and say, “Hey, something’s going on here.” And what I learned is colleges were hedging their bets. They were getting their new diversity from old sources. They were increasing the number of lower income students, but they were not saying was that they were going to private schools to get those students. And my research show that one half of lower income black students at elite colleges like Amherst and Harvard are actually the alumni of those boarding, day, and preparatory high schools. And so when I was dealing with all of that, that’s what came up with the privileged poor. Privileged poor is an oxymoron. It’s about somebody having little economic capital but having high stocks of cultural capital. They had been to elite places before. They had traveled to Tulum, they had traveled to Martha’s Vineyard, they had traveled to Nantucket, all of these very, very ritzy places. And when they got to college, they were in their fifth year of boarding school, really, and I contrast their experiences to the doubly disadvantaged, those lower income students who don’t have that same experience. And the reason why it was important to me to draw out this distinction was because any program that we created to help students in college, especially lower income and first year in college students, it would miss the mark, because if we had these two modal groups, these two people who are on different sides of the coin, if we try to navigate right down the middle, we will miss out on so many students. And so I use the privilege poor and the doubly disadvantaged, kind of like the miners’ canary, I’m able to show when and how class matters in college, both symbolically through cultural capital, those taken for granted ways of being that are valued by colleges and universities, but then also economic capital. I’ll give you just two quick examples. One, who knows what office hours are? Who’s comfortable using them? And who knows how valuable they can be, not just for your present but also your future? Usually, the literature and other people say, it’s usually the wealthier students, people whose fam went to college, I show that it wasn’t just those from money who felt comfortable, but those who had experience that only money could buy, the privileged poor and the middle class were more comfortable, the doubly disadvantaged were not. They got access to the letters recommendation. They got access to institutional resources at a higher rate than their lower income peers. But when campus closed during spring breaks, and it was about how much money you had in your pocket, now how much cultural capital you have in your mind, it didn’t matter whether you were privileged poor or doubly disadvantaged, you went hungry. And so I was able to show how students’ trajectories to college shape their pathways through college in a new and novel way. And so The Privileged Poor allowed me to engage with policy as well as academics and reducing some of the inequalities on campus.

John: The Privileged Poor was written before the pandemic, but then the pandemic hit and you started working on this new book. Could you talk a little bit about what you observed there and how that led to Class Dismissed?

Tony: Yes. So The Privileged Poor was published in 2019 and I was very fortunate that in the years in between now and 2019 I got to visit a lot of college and universities that have begun working with them to change their policies, and to date, over 80 universities have changed their dining hall policies to account for food insecurity on their campuses, both from small liberal arts colleges to large public institutions and every institution in between. And so I was having this good rapport. And The Privileged Poor also focuses on life on campus. It tries to understand how class shapes students’ engagement with their peers, professors, and the policies that govern campus life. And one thing that kept gnawing at me was that a question that The Privileged Poor cannot answer head on because of what wanted to focus on then was about students’ lives off campus, especially their families in their neighborhoods, and how that continues to shape how they move through campus. Class Dismissed came about because I was asked to do a project about how black students were experiencing inequalities on campus, especially during the pandemic, and I said I like the premise, but to fully understand how inequality shapes how students move through campus, I want to expand who I’m speaking to and the questions that I’m asking with a particular focus: how does the inequalities off campus shape daily life on campus? And that’s how this project began. I was invited to do this study by William Julius Wilson, a preeminent sociologist, and I interviewed 125 Asian, Black, Latino, Native, white and mixed students to understand truly how COVID exacerbated the very inequalities that universities were ignoring, especially how structural inequalities like poverty, segregation, the lasting legacy of redlining and blockbusting, which we already talked about at the beginning of this conversation, continues to shape how students move through campus, and I was very excited and intentional about including more groups to study, because I want to show you just how different their experiences are, especially by inclusion of Native students, who are sadly one of the most overlooked groups of college students that we have, to be able to show not just the lasting legacy of redlining and blockbusting, but the lasting legacy of land theft and disenfranchisement, deepens our understanding of what universities need to do to prepare for these students. I know we probably want to get into it, but there’s something about understanding where students come from that really shapes our understanding of where they return to and when COVID shut down campus, even if the policies for these closures were correct, we show just how ill prepared we were to help students navigate that transition. And again, and I say this in the book, this book is not a COVID book. This book is not about COVID. This book is about the inequalities that existed before that were worsened by campus closures and the pandemic. Because I really wanted us to understand where students come from and how that continues to shape their life, both as a springboard into more opportunity, because in the book, I talk about students who were able to take on unpaid internships during the pandemic. Even as the pandemic shut most of the world down, crippled some countries to the brink of bankruptcy and collapse, there were students who were taking on unpaid internships at venture capital firms, compared to then being able to show well, yeah, lower income students also took on unpaid labor, but it took on a very different form, and yet new is I’m actually going beyond just saying that both groups of students took on unpaid internships or unpaid labor, I actually show that the skill sets that are used by lower income students to carry out the work that are thrust upon them often requires a higher level skill set than those used by those in unpaid internships who complained about the grunt work and the busy work that they were able to do. But here’s the rub, whose CV is going to say what? Whose CV is going to have the right title? Whose CV is going to have the right employer? Whose CV is going to have the right detailed job description? And whose CV is going to remain silent about all the extra work that they did in addition to classes, in addition to other familiar responsibilities? So that’s why I said, to me, I hope people take away from the book that yes, COVID had a different effect on students. But I really want us to pay concrete attention to the way in which so much of what I talk about existed before March 2020, before campus closed, and these processes were continued for generations because that black box of unpaid labor that happens for lower income students, that wasn’t created four years ago, that has already existed. But then I try to also offer concrete things that we can do to begin to understand this. Because I don’t know if you all remember, in the early 2000s the Common Application introduced the familiar responsibility question to understand why students are, for example, not part of Glee Club and key society and playing a sport. And some people like, “well, I work,” or “I take care of my grandparents, “and they saw this familiar responsibility question really changed the way in which admissions officers were able to get a texture of students’ life. I asked a simple but a fundamental question in the book, Why do we have this at the end of high school, beginning of college, to help students get into college, but we have nothing like it on the way out? What are employers missing by not understanding the unpaid labor that all students do, and not just those who go to familiar places, by venture capital firms or a senator’s office or some of the other things, knowing that the work they do is mostly grunt work that doesn’t give them any kind of true experience.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that all of these inequities have existed forever, and COVID did make things more visible, but that doesn’t mean that a lot of change has occurred. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that colleges continue to fall short?

Tony: Yeah, one of the things that I highlight in my work is, oftentimes, I don’t want to say the actions, but the happenings of the most overlooked offices on campus. And I’ll talk about like, you know, the Dean of Students Office and other places like that. And to give you an example, I talk a lot about academic leave policies in the book, and the reason why is because it often shows both the class biases and the, quite frankly, ignorance that colleges have about where students come from, and I talk a lot about where students come from, because we’re talking about universities that are reaching out and saying, “We want you. We want a student from every state and every type of community, like we want to diversify our campuses along all of these lines.” But are you ready for it? If you want it, you get credit for recruiting it. But are you ready? Do you actually know what students need? The reason why I talk about leave policies is because I exposed in the book the very class and paternalistic approach that we take to it. When a student wants to take a year off and do an internship or just take a year off just to travel, the only thing they have to do is email that Dean and say, “Hey, I’m not coming back next semester.” They fill out something, but it’s usually very light work. If a student is asked to take the time off, and a lot of people will say, “Well, it’s probably because they cheated, or that something like that,” it’s often not because of the work. It’s because they are struggling to manage the expectations of home and the reality of college. When universities tell students that they need to leave campus for academic leave, they almost act like parole officers and put a whole bunch of responsibilities on students, new responsibilities on students as they are going home. So even though a student is at their most vulnerable, many universities require students to work a full-time job and take class at a local university while they are away from campus. There are some universities that require letters of recommendation from that employer. Now to middle-class America, that may not sound so outrageous, but what if you come from a community where 50% population have jobs and the other half do not? What if you come from a community where you’re not only the first person in your family to go to college, you one of a few people in the entire community to go to college. Who is comfortable and familiar with writing the types of letter of recommendation to assess your mental ability when you are fighting to get a job at the local fast food joint or Walgreens or CVS or Duane Reade, because that’s all the jobs that you could possibly apply for in your area. If we don’t understand the geography of inequality, especially as it pertains to access to employment, access to schools, access to mental health counselors or individuals who can assess that, are we truly helping students when we’re giving them a task that can’t be done, not while they’re home? There are some students who had to leave home after they have left college to go to a place to be able to fulfill that because they live on the reservation and finding work in that way was impossible? What about our students who come from more rural communities where jobs aren’t as available as the apples on trees? There are so many things, and so I use students’ experiences to not only show how different those who come from privilege and those who do not, how different their college times are. But I also relate that to policies that we could actually change on the college campus to address the inequalities. It’s heartening that the University of Rochester, for example, has a program that they’ve had for years called the Take Five program, because they know that lower income students disproportionately have more disruptive life events that undercut their academic experience. They were like, you are admitted under this take five program, because we know that this time that you are investing in higher education is often going to be punctured with moments that leave you so broken and bruised you might take a week or two slower. And so I try to highlight those other things. And the reason why I talk about policy here is because, as I was doing this book, I was inspired by the work in The Privileged Poor, where I was able to get universities, for example, to change their dining hall policy. And so I sent out a theme for the book. I said, “Well, now that we know what we know, what are we going to do about it? What’s the point in just writing about inequality if we’re not going to address it? If students’ stories give the general scaffolding of policies that can be adopted, why not listen to them? Why not let that inform the universities that govern campus life?” I just want to bring attention to that because the fact of the matter is, as our communities become ever more diverse, by geography, by race, by class, we must pay attention to those sending communities in the same way how any immigration scholar will tell you country of origin matters because US policy differs, differs because of their relationship with each country. The same thing applies. Harvard and BU and Amherst have real nice diplomatic relations with Greenwich Village, with the Upper West Side, with Palo Alto, very great diplomatic relationships; from Coconut Grove, from Detroit, from parts of Brooklyn, from parts of Cleveland, St Louis, not so much. We don’t understand, and because we don’t have an understanding of that inequality, it’s hard for us to adopt policy that is receptive to it, because, again, to ask a student to take on a full- time job when they come from a community where jobs have been gone for a generation, is giving them a task that they cannot complete. The sad part about it is those requirements were not always relaxed during COVID19, some universities still required students to work during it. One student told me that she had to petition to get two part-time jobs to count because that was all she was able to find during the pandemic. And because what she come from, there weren’t a lot of jobs, and then she had to take on these two part time. Now, this is the same person who lived in a house with a family member who was on dialysis. This is the same person who lived with immunocompromised people, and she had to petition yet again and say, “Hey, I am afraid, deathly afraid, to go out to work. Please don’t make me because I’m fearful of hurting my family member.” She had to petition for it, because universities weren’t flexible enough to actually realize the consequences of it, or they were so rigid in their policy. And this book is not a book that is organized by, “Oh, this is policy, let me see the effect, right?” No, the book is organized by understanding how students dealt with the inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic in their families, finances, in the fault lines along race on campus. And when you look at the family dynamics and the consequences of it., you just see how it’s important to understand that students, especially lower income and first-gen college students, they’re not running away from home. They’re trying to get away from the things that make home hard. That’s why so many first gens are driven. It’s not because they don’t like home, it’s that they don’t like aspects of home that make life hell, whether that means having to do, as I talk about myself, whether that means having to do homework by candlelight because the power was out more often than not, whether it was not having your own bed or your own space to be, or enough to eat, those are very real thing. But I also want to highlight the ways in which university policies make coming from those spaces even harder, and to some students, they almost felt intentional.

John: So far, we’ve mostly been talking about institutional policies. But what role do individual faculty members play in this?

Tony: Individual faculty and staff are also important players in this, So, I’ll give you an example from the book. In the book, I show how universities have a segregated on-campus labor market where students are almost divided by social class in what jobs they go after and what jobs they get. What I show is that middle class students, or rather, students who are comfortable engaging with faculty were more likely to get research, teaching, and course assistantships. They were more likely to be in quote, unquote, those like life of the mind positions, the academic kind of heavy lifting work of the University. Students from lower income backgrounds who were not comfortable engaging with adults were more likely to be in manual labor positions like barista, grounds keeping, janitorial. That was happening long before the pandemic hit, and then when campus closed, and what I’m able to show in the book, is that lower income students who weren’t comfortable lost their jobs, those who were comfortable with faculty kept their jobs, and even increased their hours. I talk about this being directly about what faculty can and cannot do because so often assistantship jobs, whether it’s course, teaching, or research, those jobs aren’t even posted. Those jobs are doled out in office hours. Those jobs are people who are tapped for those positions. But if you are not in those spaces, even if you’re the best qualified because you know the material, you don’t get that job. In the end, what I show is the students who needed more were given less. The students who needed to earn more money to support themselves and their family were given fewer hours, less resources, and less support. The students who needed less, at least financially, were given more: more hours, more money, more support. It increased the disparity that what these jobs can do, and importantly, let’s then move beyond the pandemic. If you have a job when you have high faculty interactions, you not only get paid today, but you get a letter recommendation tomorrow. But if you have a transactional job where it’s pay for services rendered, that’s all you really get, is the pay today, there aren’t readily available opportunities for you to use your job to fully access institutional resources. Yet, if you work for me or any faculty member, there’s a greater likelihood that you will be able to access something from our networks, whether it’s, “Oh, I’m going to be meeting with the Director of HUD,” or “I’m meeting with this Director of a movie, they’re giving me three extra tickets. why don’t you come with me?” All of a sudden, you’re meeting people in different kind of ways. Or I. can put you on to say,”Hey, this person’s hiring next year. You should think about interning there.” These are just like very, very real opportunities that students who are connected to faculty members who are in the know or who can connect them with it, do more. They get more and so that’s why I want to challenge faculty. And faculty have great autonomy and greater access. One chemistry professor, for example, can hire as many students as an entire office like a dean of students. Some chemistry professors’ labs are 20 or 30 people strong, and half of them are undergraduates. So we have power within ourselves. I was doing a professional development program this weekend, and I met a Dean, and he said that he just changed the rule that if a faculty member does not list the job on the university’s website, they will not be eligible for a benefit that the college gives for hiring undergraduates. And I applauded them for that, because that is a step in the direction that I think we all should go. Because, as I also show in the book, when you make explicit the hiring process, lower income students from all backgrounds, whether it’s public or public school or private school, or their familiarity with elite environments, they’re more likely to apply or feel that it’s an opportunity that is available to them.

Rebecca: I think in this example and the previous example, you’re really highlighting the relational aspects that are really important for students to be successful in various ways, both on campus and in the next steps after campus. And you’ve really highlighted the idea of both in the example of the petitioning, and even knowing that petitioning is an option or building relationships with faculty, and even knowing that’s an option to get opportunities and highlighting the idea of making things more explicit. Is that the direction that institutions need to go in is developing policies that really highlight transparency, or are there other suggestions that you have for institutions?

Tony: I mean, transparency is huge, but it’s not just transparency. I think it’s also translation, because the more we leave to random connections, random conversations, or random moments of, “Hey, you look familiar,” or “Hey, do you take my class?” …the more we will see these class processes to continue, because students who are comfortable will avail themselves to more resources because they know how the college works, students who are not especially lower-income students think that hiring, grades, internships, fellowships, should be about the work, and yet, sometimes doing the best is not what gets noticed. It’s being present. It’s being in the room. I always tell the story of, when you apply for the Rhode to go to Oxford for study, you need eight letters of recommendation, eight. Who knows eight people, and not just know them, but who knows eight people who know them well enough to write true letters of recommendation for them, to endorse them for one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious, undergraduate award you can receive? You can be a 4.0 student, but if you’re a 4.0 student who has never been to office hours, who has never attended a faculty and student-faculty dinner, that has never worked for someone in their lab, do you have an advocate on campus for you who can say anything else, other than they were the top performer? But if you were a student who got like a 3.85, not quite 4.0, but still A range person, but you went to office hours because you didn’t do as well on your first exam, and you started going, and you develop a rapport with a faculty member, and you begin to work with that faculty member on their project. And then when that faculty member goes away for a week, sometimes you babysit their dog, or you become a member of their lab and their family, that letter is going to reflect that connection. But we leave so much in that black box of the hidden curriculum about how you should navigate college, and we almost never talk about employment. As a matter of fact, as I argue in the book, university takes a very hands-off approach to on-campus employment. We were like, “Just use this website or attend this job fair.” Job fairs are not neutral ground. We say “wear business casual.” What does that mean? As one student told me, “I don’t know what business casual was.” Some people may hear us talk in this conversation and be “Well, like, this is duh, like, it’s business casual. Get some loafers, get a jacket. Of course, you’re going to go and talk to a faculty member.” If anyone is having that thought right now, I would want them to ask themselves three questions: “What’s the highest level of education of the person who raised me? What job do they have? and how similar or different was my high school to the college that I went?” We have to remember, people with PhDs are 12 to 25 times more likely to have a PhD parent. Faculty members are like doctors, dentists, and the vets. It’s a hereditary position. So many faculty members have not only family members who have PhDs, but who are the children of PhDs. Again, through studying students’ experiences, through their families, finances, and the fault lines along race on campus, I was able to expose the way in which students move through campus on uneven and unequal grounds, long before the pandemic, and was able to chart how much rockier it got.

John: So, we’ve talked quite a bit about institutional issues and institutional policies, as well as some things specific to faculty. One of the things that happened with the pandemic, though, is faculty, often for the first time, recognized the extent of some of the inequities that their students were facing when they were seeing students who had trouble accessing wireless networks, or accessing Zoom, and struggling to share a computer, or being busy taking care of sick relatives or other issues, and there was at least a bit of recognition of some of these inequities. But I’m wondering if maybe faculty are backing a little bit away from that now as we’ve moved a bit further from the pandemic. A lot of people were a little bit more relaxed about deadlines and other policies and were a little more aware of the role of the hidden curriculum and so forth, but I’m not sure that that’s continued at the same level we’d like.

Tony: And that’s one of the reasons why I hope that this book doesn’t take us back to COVID, but it resurfaces the lessons that we learned through it, with some new ones, of course, because for me, I don’t want us to have this “get back to normal,” this post-pandemic normal, this new normal. The new normal is too easy. It will all too easy become a replication of what we had before if we don’t take these inequalities into consideration. If we don’t understand the way in which class shapes how students move through campus, and how race often exacerbates those differences, we just go back to what we had. We need to strive for something more like an equitable campus. We haven’t seen that.

Rebecca: Moving towards an equitable campus requires some hard work and change, and sometimes that’s something that people are really afraid of.

Tony: Yeah, I was thinking about something I said, it was like: “Simply following the impulse to get back to normal will only be a setback. If we return to normal, we will return to what was. We will once again be held hostage to the inequities that plague higher education and society alike. We will once again hold ourselves and our institutions back from being what we could be, what we should be. Let us not yearn for normalcy. I don’t want to be normal in the sense of the normal operating procedure. We need things to disrupt the normal operating procedure, unless our intention is to harm the very students who we are paying millions to recruit, retain, and graduate. If your intention is to do that harm, then you can go back with the new normal that’s basically going to be what we had part two. But that is not your intention, then you need to rethink and reframe many policies.”

John: In addition to the need for institutional change, are there some specific things that faculty can do in their classes to help reduce some of the effects of the inequities that our students face?

Tony: I’m a sociologist, and I already get in trouble for being as prescriptive as I am in the sense that “you’re too applied,” I’m like, “Well, again, now that we know, we know what we’re going to do about it,” but I don’t want to be so prescriptive that I limit the imagination of faculty. I’ll give you an example: in reading The Privileged Poor. I talk about the fact that we always say when office hours are. We almost never say what they are. And my work on office hours has spurred hundreds of faculty to begin to define office hours on their syllabi and on the first day of class. I want them to be similarly inspired. And here’s where it gets fun. Some people were in class 10 minutes early, and walked the class to their office to show people where they are. I never said to do that. I want to put people on the path to understanding the nature of America and how it comes to campus. We all don’t have the same streets to walk down. Some people gladly take a walk at night and stretch their legs. Other people know that that is a luxury that could cost them their life. And I say America, not saying that we are not global institutions, but we also know the larger context of the recruitment of lower-income students, especially in no-loan financial aid policies that are at nearly 80 no-loan schools in America. The vast majority of them only have no-loan policies for U.S. students. For me, that’s why I say America. And so I don’t want to be so prescriptive and tell fabrics what they need to do, but I do wish more people knew about redlining and blockbusting. I do wish more people knew about land theft and settler colonialism, and not just in the historical context, because we love to say that happened a long time ago, like Jim Crow laws were a long time ago. I’m like, “No, they weren’t.” I wish we understood the present-day manifestations of those inherently disenfranchising practices, because if we did, I think we would come to understand the reality that the greatest determining factor of an individual’s life chances in this country is a zip code in which you are born. In the land of the free, home of the brave, the place of unbound opportunity, if I know your zip code, I can predict how old you are going to be when you die, if you go to school, if you will graduate from high school, what college you would go to. Neighborhood isn’t destiny, but it almost feels sometimes that those who make it out took a detour that was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. There was a moment, there was a broken light that said, “turn here” instead of keep going and getting stuck into a different path. And so I just hope that this book spurs conversations on campus, not only to revisit some of the most invisible policies that have rather large impacts on student life, but also thinking about how we move through campus.

Rebecca: I hope a lot of faculty and administrators and other folks involved with our institutions read your book and really come together with creativity and have some interesting solutions or experiments to make change happen. We always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Tony: What’s next? That is a great question. I told you I’m first-gen. I never got to do a college tour when I was in high school. I didn’t know what a college tour was when I went to the prep school, you know, I was around a whole bunch of rich people, and they were like, “Oh, well, we’re gonna take a week through the California schools and a week through the New England Schools.” And I was like, “whatever I can’t see online when I’m at school on a computer because I don’t have internet at home, it won’t be seen.” And so I always say that when I go and share the work with people, as I’m invited to campus. This is my college tour. And so one thing that I look forward to about what’s next is visiting campuses to share the book. And also I am knitting another baby blanket for my graduate advisee, who just welcomed his first child into the world with his wife. And so that’s what’s next for me, is the book tour and a baby blanket. I actually just went and got the yarn this weekend, and I chose a pattern.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting, a nice balance.

Tony: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: And we do appreciate your book tours. In fact, we very much appreciated when you visited Oswego after your previous book. And I know shortly after that visit, a lot of people stopped calling office hours, office hours, and started using other names and moved them to other places to make them a little bit more welcoming. So I know that was a fairly immediate effect of one of those college tour visits.

Tony: Actually, Oswego was my last in-person visit before campus closed.

John: Yeah, we closed just a week or two after that. I think. I remember that, yeah,

Tony: I think I came up on March, 7th or 8th, I believe, and campus closed on March 10. [LAUGHTER] It was my last visit. I got off the plane, I was like, “Yeah, this is a different world we are living in.

John: Well, we were glad you made it before everything shut down.

Tony: I am too

Rebecca: …extra memorable. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you. We really enjoyed talking to you, and we’re looking forward to sharing this episode and to reading the book, which should be arriving shortly, my pre-order went in a couple months ago.

Tony: Awesome. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us.

Tony: Thank you all so much.

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

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

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354. International College Students

Posted in diversity, equity, higher education, inclusion, international education, international students, learning, study abroad, support network
August 14, 2024

International college students face cultural and financial challenges in addition to those all new college students face. In this episode, Peter Ghazarian and Hayley Weiner join us to discuss strategies institutions might use to support international students.  Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. He has worked in international education in the US, UK, Germany, and Korea. Peter’s work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy, multiculturalism, and human migration. Hayley is a graduate student in the Higher Education Leadership program at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

Transcript

John:International college students face cultural and financial challenges in addition to those all new college students face. In this episode, we discuss strategies institutions might use to support international students.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Peter Ghazarian and Hayley Weiner. Peter is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego. Peter has worked in international education in the US, UK, Germany, and Korea. His work focuses on higher education, leadership, public policy, multiculturalism, and human migration. Hayley is a graduate student in the Higher Education Leadership program at SUNY Oswego. Welcome Peter and Haley.

Peter: Hi.

Hayley: Hi.

John:Our teas today are: … Peter, are you drinking any tea?

Peter: I actually am currently drinking some tea. For the summer, I would say my go to is unsweetened black tea, and that’s what I have right now. It’s hard to get away from it.

Rebecca: It’s perfect.

John:And Haley?

Hayley: I’m drinking chai today.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: …and Rebecca?

Rebecca: I am drinking a Scottish afternoon in anticipation of my upcoming trip in two days.

Peter: That’s exciting.

John:And I am drinking an Irish Breakfast tea, which is in the same general neighborhood.

Rebecca: I’m going there too. We invited you here today to discuss your research on the experience of international students in US education. Can you start by helping us understand the current landscape of international students studying abroad in the United States? Like, who are the students? Are they from particular regions, levels of affluence, et cetera?

Peter: Yeah. So I’d say there’s been kind of a sea change in the international student population in the United States since COVID. Prior to COVID, I would say it was predominantly dominated by middle- and upper-class students from China. But then with the trade war, and then with the COVID outbreak and the zero-COVID policy in mainland China, it led to a lot of diversification of international students coming to the United States after COVID. And so we are starting to see a lot more students from India in particular, and also from Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in Nigeria. A lot of students coming to the United States from Nigeria.

John:And could you talk a little bit about the research project that you’ve both been working on?

Hayley: Yes, so Peter and I were intrigued by this idea of why international students come to the United States and what their experiences are in terms of seeking employment. A lot of international students express this notion of wanting to gain either internship experiences or post-graduation employment, normally in the form of CPT or OPT and Peter and I are very intrigued, as these students often express positive and negative experiences that are unique compared to what their domestic peers may experience when trying to gain employment of that kind.

Peter: And we’re also kind of interested in these competing personal versus professional elements or aspects to their experience, where they have kind of this imagined experience that they’re going to have as international students. And then there’s this reality and these economic demands that come upon them that they might not have anticipated. And so there’s almost a direct kind of butting of heads there between those two aspects of their time abroad.

John:You mentioned OPT and CPT. Could you define those terms for our listeners?

Hayley: Yeah, so CPT stands for Curricular Practical Training, and this is a work authorization for international students while they’re maintaining their student status, so they can only participate in CPT for employment that is directly related to their major, and while they are in a current student status. OPT, on the other hand, stands for optional practical training, and this is specifically for students after they graduate. And traditionally, students will go for a full-time job, but students can do either part time or full time or even internship. But OPT is specifically for their post-graduation employment.

Peter: And so for a lot of students, that becomes this period where the clock is ticking down if they want to find visa sponsorship through an employer. And so many students see this almost as kind of this grace period after they finish their program to try out with an employer or employers, and hopefully be able to win their support to stay in the United States as a full-time employee there.

Hayley: Yeah, and to add on to what Peter said with this idea of a clock, specifically with OPT, with students finding their post-graduation employment, there’s a lot of federal rules. For example, the latest date that they can start their OPT is 60 days after their graduation date. And as we know, navigating the job market in the current way it is, it’s very difficult for domestic students, international students, or any student in general, to find a job within a specific, constrained timeframe. And international students don’t get the privilege of looking for jobs outside of their major or maybe just taking a job that can earn them a little bit of money while they seek something that is more up to what they’re looking for in the long run. So keeping in mind that there are these federal regulations about the days and there’s this constant pressure sitting on them to find the jobs, even while they’re a student and post graduation.

Peter: Once students become aware of that, it’s almost like the specter that’s haunting them in all of their experiences, whether or not they’re in class or whether they’re building personal relationships with their peers, there’s this creeping dread of this clock ticking down and this need to find some security in life.

Rebecca: Those federal regulations impact the front end of the experience as well. Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges international students face in even coming to the United States to study?

Peter: So international students… I would say the biggest struggle is to get that student visa on the front end. So past work that I’ve done related to destination choice among international students has primarily focused on country image and how that influences individual students’ choices. And what I’ve found in the past is that actually much more important than individual perceptions of a destination are the country-level relationships between a student’s home country and the destination, and so they’re much more likely to choose a place that has a good, constructive, positive relationship with wherever it is they’re trying to go. That plays more of a dominant role in deciding whether they go or don’t go to a particular destination. But then there are also other issues that they consider, such as financial barriers and regulations that can get in the way of them easily being able to access higher education within a particular destination. And for the United States, the big barrier, I would say, is demonstrating the ability to financially pay for the study in the United States. It’s for those who’ve had the experience, it’s a bit like applying for a mortgage, but instead of being asked to show that you can pay for it in the future, that you can already pay for the entire house before. [LAUGHTER] And so there’s a lot of financial gymnastics that people go through to try and demonstrate that, even though it is a big ask for them and it can be very difficult for them.

Hayley: Yeah, to jump onto what Peter was mentioning about the financial aspect, I currently work as a DSO in SUNY Oswego’s international student office, and a DSO is a designated school official. So I help students when they’re preparing for their visa interviews or when they’re getting their initial documents, such as a form I-20 to apply for their visa interview. And a very common occurrence is international students needing additional time or having struggles in terms of demonstrating the financial ability, and specifically, international students don’t get the privilege of applying for FAFSA or other United States federal aid programs that their domestic counterparts may get the opportunity to apply for. And so as a result, they have a larger sum of money that they may need to come up with up front, like Peter mentioned. And sometimes, even if they don’t receive the visa on its own, they still needed to come up with that money just to get the visa interview appointment.

Rebecca: And then my understanding is that, depending on where you’re coming from, getting a visa appointment is also a challenge …just scheduling it and making it happen in a time frame that makes sense to start school.

Peter: I’ve had many applicants, for example, from Ghana, who are really struggling with that. It’s just booked out so far in advance, it’s so difficult for them to get an appointment, and the students feel as though they’re very unlikely to be awarded a visa unless they’ve been given some form of scholarship or some sort of financial assistance with the offer. And so students are pretty desperate in that situation.

Hayley: A lot of preparation goes into it as well. Peter mentioned Ghana. I know India is a country where sometimes students are waiting one year or more. I’ve seen students wait years …plural… just to get their visa interview booked. And sometimes students are more eager and they want to have it sooner. And this does result in a different perception of whether they decide to come to the United States specifically to pursue their degrees, or maybe what degree they’re going to pursue, because they’re looking for that longer benefit in terms of financial benefits.

John:Implicit in this discussion is the notion, I think, that most of the students who are coming from abroad are interested in staying here after it, or at least staying long enough to get some training. What proportion of students are coming with the intention of staying in the U.S. after they complete their schooling, and what proportion are planning to return to their countries?

Peter: I don’t have hard numbers for that, but the sense that I get is that a lot of students are pretty fluid in their view of whether they stay in the United States. A lot of students are also willing to go to other third destinations that are English speaking, for example, like Singapore or Hong Kong, or places where English is the lingua franca, and they feel like they’d still be competitive in the job market, but they would be making what we might call a global middle-class wage, although some of the students we spoke to were interested in going back home after getting a bit of experience here, believing it would allow them to move into kind of an elite position back in their home country. In particular, I believe one student was interested in moving for a global energy company that was active within their home country. They believed if they had some energy industry experience in the United States, it would be pretty easy for them to transition into that type of position back in their home country, which is a position for an elite individual there.

John:Given the additional financial requirements for students coming from abroad, it would seem like most of the students who come in would be coming in from above average incomes in many of the countries of origin, which means we’re mostly providing some additional benefits to those who are already relatively privileged in their countries. Is that accurate?

Peter: And that is absolutely accurate. I have actually done a study that looked at whether or not international higher education exacerbates income inequality. In any case, it depends on the host or the sending destination. In some places, it is something that is seen for the elite, and it is almost something that’s required for them to return back to their home and get a position within a large corporation or within the government. It’s seen as kind of a stamp of approval having that international qualification. But in other places, what we’ve started to see is that when we do have people who are from a lower income background who participate in international higher education, it does contribute to intergenerational mobility, and that tends to be an improvement in their social class as a result of their participation. And it just depends on the place. And so in a lot of East Asians countries that are sending students, it is contributing to the inequality, whereas in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, that’s where it’s having more of a positive impact and contributing to economic mobility there.

John:So you’re working on the study of international students in the US. Where’s the sample drawn from?

Hayley: We focus on a phenomenological study where we focused on the shared lived experiences of international students. And just due to our resources, we did use a population of SUNY Oswego students specifically, and these students were a mix of both current students and recent graduated students. And to my knowledge, all of our students were a undergraduate degree level or recent undergraduate alumni.

Peter: There were students from India, Malaysia, Nepal, Bahamas, and Senegal. We did reach out to other institutions in central New York, to their offices of international students and scholars, to ask them to kind of spread the word and help to recruit but we got only a few responses to those initial entreaties, and then when we tried to schedule interviews with those folks, there was no response.

Rebecca: What are some of the challenges that international students face while studying in the US and adapting to the US educational system?

Hayley: I think a big overlooked challenge that international students face, that maybe others may not acknowledge, is they’re kind of starting over in a brand new setting. They not only have to get adjusted to the culture, but there’s some things that maybe people who live in the United States for their whole lives take kind of for granted. So, for example, international students, they’re permitted to have an on-campus job, but they don’t have a social security number. They have to go through the process of applying for a social security number. International Students don’t have bank accounts in the United States, and they can’t even pay for food their first couple days here because they don’t have maybe a card or anything to use at, like the grocery store, or they don’t have a SIM card for their phones to call their families back home. And I think there’s a lot of cultural adjustment that takes place, and students are kind of rushed into being acquainted with United States higher education settings, because not only do they have to deal with all of these cultural adjustments, but they have their schoolwork that piles up almost immediately after they arrive.

Peter: Yeah, and in terms of what we learned just in speaking to participants in the research study, what was kind of surprising or jumped out to us was that they are going through a lot of the same identity development phases that domestic students or local students go through but there’s these additional layers on top of those experiences that they’re having with having to navigate a new cultural environment and dealing with some of this economic pressure that they have on them. For some folks, they’re able to navigate that successfully, and they’re alright, even though it is very stressful. But for others, it is very difficult. For them. There’s always something to worry about, and it makes it very difficult for them to just relax and enjoy the moment, because there’s always some issue or concern that’s kind of lingering in the back of their minds.

John:In terms of cultural differences that they have to navigate, one of those, I think, would be differences in the way in which instruction takes place in US classrooms. Could you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that students face in adjusting to a college environment in the U.S.

Peter: I would say, from our participants, we heard mostly positive things. So the students themselves, coming from a younger generation, felt happy and excited for maybe more of a student-focused approach to instruction and more active learning in the classroom. They appreciated the opportunity to be able to interact with their peers, and felt that it really strengthened their communicative abilities. And so it seemed to be a very positive thing for the vast majority of students. They did mention that it was strange at first and a little difficult to adjust to it, but that overall, it’s something they enjoyed. It’s something they saw valuable as part of this attractiveness of US higher education in general.

Rebecca: Some of the conversations that I had with some international students recently in terms of the kind of classroom setting was the expectation of scaffolding, or the steps to complete assignments that maybe they had an experience in their home country, and not understanding that those things were required, or that those were different kinds of expectations that we have here. So it’s made me as an instructor much more aware of being explicit about what some of those differences might be. Are there other ways that instructors can support this transition into the US system?

Peter: I would say, looking at it almost from kind of this universal design for learning perspective, would be the best way to think about it is that the more explicit and clear you are in general about your expectations, it’s going to benefit not just international students, it’s going to benefit all of the students that are in your course. So making sure that you’re communicating your expectations about assignments in multiple ways, so that the most people can get it or can understand it is going to be really key here in just improving instruction for everyone. And international students will, of course, also benefit from this, but I think everyone can benefit.

Rebecca: So in addition to adjusting to the classroom and some of the adjustments to the U.S., what are some other changes that international students describe?

Peter: So, one of the big things that we heard about was personal change. So students weren’t just adapting to a new cultural environment, it was also having an impact on how they saw themselves and their idea of themselves. And so a few of the students talked about internalizing ways of thinking that they had originally felt were foreign or different or that they were uncomfortable with, but now they saw it as part of who they were, and that they had this interesting experience of moving between selves. So there was their home country culture self, and then there was their US culture self, and depending on the context, they had to be a little bit fluid in their identity and how they behaved and the way that they thought, but that that was an important part of adapting and excelling within a cultural environment is having that flexibility to be able to reinterpret yourself according to the rules of a different game you might be playing according to which culture you’re operating in.

Hayley: And it seemed like when the students kind of described this personal change or transition, like Peter mentioned, it wasn’t really a superficial change that they were describing. They were describing more of like a deeper engagement with the new culture that they were experiencing, and how this deeper engagement worked to reshape their thought processes and their perspectives, and how it was very transformative within their cultural immersion into US higher education institutions,

Peter: There were times when they were able to achieve that imagined or idealized experience of studying abroad that they originally had before they came to the United States. So I think one participant in particular talked about walking home late at night from a part-time job that they held on campus, and how they would never be able to do that in their home country, because it would have been unsafe for them to be walking alone by themselves, and just how they felt so free and they felt so independent that they started crying on the walk home, because they felt like they had achieved what they had dreamed or hoped for by coming to the United States.

Hayley: And that kind of ties on to this, like aspirational kind of rationale that Peter and I focused on on our research as well, where both personal and professional international students have this motivation to come to the United States because there’s dreams that they have. And like Peter mentioned, there was that student who just felt this sense of relief, or just a sense of satisfaction of being where they were at that point, being in the United States, and they felt like they were living what they were dreaming of when they were a child. And then we have the professional side, where they’re international students. I remember one student describing to us how she was thinking of being a doctor, and how in her home country, she knew that being a doctor and being a female doctor didn’t have as much room or level for success. And then another student from the same country mentioned wanting to be a geologist and how, in her home country, geology is not a very popular science, and that more engineering and doctors are from that home country, and how coming to the United States allowed them to have this diversified curriculum that allowed them to fit into these dream roles that they imagined when they were younger.

Peter: And so what we were trying to make sense of these different rationales for studying abroad. We weren’t just doing this like on our own or pulling this out of the thin air. We came into this with a theoretical framework that we adapted from a researcher called Fakunle, who’s based in the United Kingdom at the University of Edinburgh and Fakunle has put together a model for the different types of rationales that international students have for studying abroad. And it’s something that she put together speaking primarily to international students in Europe. And we wanted to see how well it held up while we were speaking to international students here in the United States. And we found that the model applied very well. And those four rationales are an aspirational rationale, an educational rationale, an economic rationale, and then an experiential rationale.

Rebecca: That transitions nicely into thinking about international students for an F1 visa and that OPT or that optional practical training that we talked a little bit about earlier in trying to find a job in their field or discipline immediately following graduation. What is the experience like for students trying to find these opportunities? I know from my own conversations with international students, it can be a struggle. Can you share what some of those barriers are that they might face in this job hunt?

Hayley: I think a very major barrier is that sometimes employers don’t comprehend or understand what it means to be an international student, and believe it or not, with OPT, if a student plans to use their one year of OPT, or in STEM students’ case, they get an additional 24 months of OPT, an employer does not need to provide sponsorship of any kind, and the student is eligible to work for that given employer, so long as that employment is directly related to their major. And sometimes employers get scared or worried about the idea of hiring an international student, either just they don’t have the resources to know what it means, or they’ve never done it before, and that acts as a significant hinder for international students. Now I know when we were interviewing students, there were a few students who mentioned that they were able to easily acquire a job, and it took a few tries, but they were able to get one before they graduated. And we’ve had other students who mentioned that it was much more difficult to get post-graduation employment, and after graduating, it became their full-time job to apply for a job, but keeping in mind that they only had that limited number of days to seek that employment added this extra stress that was very troublesome for the students.

Peter: Yeah, and I would say that it’s not just the employers that are ignorant of the rules that surround OPT, there’s also a concern that support services on campus beyond the international student office, aren’t always aware of these regulations or how they impact a student’s employability, and so students felt like they had to take anything that they heard from Career Services or an internship opportunity that they heard about with a grain of salt, because those are almost always developed or they’re communicated in a way that’s targeted towards local students, and it might not play out the same way for an international student. That opportunity might not exist for them. And they also talked a lot about how they avoided medium or smaller companies as a result of those companies’ lack of awareness or knowledge of OPD or CPT, and the belief that they would just kind of not even consider them seriously because they weren’t aware of how OPT or CPT worked. And so this was a source of pressure for a lot of students. They felt like they were supposed to be the expert of these policies, but they’re very complicated, and for somebody, for example, who’s communicating in a foreign language, trying to express this in a way that calms the nerves of a potential employer is not something that’s easy to do.

John:Might part of that be due to concern that when many new employees are taken on, particularly in technical fields, there’s a lot of on-the-job training that’s provided, which is costly to the firm. And might there be concern on the firm’s part that they might invest in workers who will not be able to get a change in visa status?

Peter: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely a legitimate concern on the part of a company. Interestingly though, it seems like those technical positions are the ones where the students tend to have more success in applying for the positions. And so students, for example, who are going into mining or into IT roles, those are the students who often have the most success in their applications for OPT even though those tend to be the positions that have a lot of on-the-job training that they are going to receive. And I wonder whether or not that’s because those are industries that are traditionally more open to recruiting from abroad, and so perhaps they feel more comfortable with working with these students who might need some sort of sponsorship in the future,

John:And also the fact that there are not that many students in the U.S. majoring in those fields, so that a very large share of employees in those areas are coming from overseas … fortunately, or we’d be in much worse trouble in our country.

Rebecca: It might also be tied to the potential three years of OPT rather than one that is often tied with those particular fields which are STEM designated

Hayley: Based on our interviews with students, as well as just my work in general, I noticed that students who are in STEM designated majors, even for their first year of OPT, before their STEM extension is even granted, they have a much easier time just getting their foot in the door or getting an interview, compared to students who are maybe in the field of like business or communications, and I think that longer extension of OPT could possibly have an impact on an employer making the initial investment into an international student as a first-time employee.

Peter: Right, because one year isn’t really enough time to know for sure whether or not you would want to keep somebody on, but three years, you know then, you know for sure whether or not this is somebody you want to sponsor or not. And so, actually one of our participants made a comment like, “I just don’t think a year is enough for me to prove myself to an employer. And so I don’t think I’ll be able to stay. I’m glad that I have the opportunity to gain that experience here.” But, that person, in particular, really regretted not being in a field that offered the longer OPT because she felt like that would have given her a better chance to be able to stay in the United States in the future. An interesting sort of side effect of that that I’ve seen, is that a lot of institutions are coming up with ways to get their programs designated as being in the STEM fields, in order to make it more attractive for international students. So I I’ve seen, for example, like a business analytics program, that they really focused heavily on data visualization and those types of things in order to promote it and get it approved as a STEM field degree program. But is it actually a STEM field degree program? I don’t know.

Hayley: It is actually, yeah, business analytics was recently added to the list of STEM designated degrees.

Rebecca: What could institutions do or advocate for to minimize some of the challenges for students as they pursue work opportunities?

Hayley: I think, while it may not be the sole solution, a really great solution could be showing international students how to market themselves. I noticed a lot of international students worry that maybe because of their international background, they may not line up with a domestic peer who studied in the United States their entire lives. But that’s not always the case. International students have specific traits such as being able to easily adapt to new cultural settings, or a lot of times they speak even multiple languages, and this is something that their domestic counterparts who are applying for the same jobs, they don’t often have that same trait. And so by being able to market themselves in the current or modern workplace or in the job market itself, I think that would be one way to minimize some of the challenges. I don’t see that as being one of the ways to get rid of all challenges, but it could allow international students to have an upper hand.

Peter: And I think a lot of student support services that are available on campuses now are in this sort of one-size-fits-all approach to supporting students, and that that can be to the detriment of students who are coming from non-traditional backgrounds who are participating in higher education here in the United States. So international students, for example, suffer from this. Non-traditional students might suffer from this. First-generation students might suffer from maybe an older approach to providing support services to students that in the past did serve well, but now maybe we need to be thinking a little bit more carefully about how do we individualize these services that we’re providing, so that we are at least aware of the different types of support that different students are going to need if they’re going to be successful transitioning from higher education into the workplace, and so international students would absolutely benefit from this. And I think that, in order to make this work, there needs to be a little bit more communication across offices on university campuses, because now a lot of these things are very siloed off from one another, and so it prevents, for example, an understanding of students who are receiving accessibility support in their work: searching for a job, for example, or students who are international, who are looking for a job, might have specific needs that they would benefit from if those offices were aware of what one another were doing and they were sharing information a little bit more openly with one another.

John:A while back, we did an interview with someone from the University of Miami who was talking about a program they had there to help prepare students from China for American classrooms in terms of the difference in structure and the difference in expectations, in terms of active participation and discussion. Is that something that perhaps more colleges could do to ease some of the transitions?>

Peter: So there was kind of a boom in those types of programs, in those gateway programs, they were often called, and they met with mixed success. In some cases, they were really helpful, and it helped students to adapt by giving them a soft transition period when they could adapt to the expectations of the U.S. university, before they went into a more high-stakes environment where they were getting graded for their actual content area coursework. However, some people were critical of this. They saw it almost as a money grab by the institutions who were asking these students to complete maybe 24 credits of coursework that wasn’t really going to apply towards a degree, and a lot of the times it was a conditional part of their acceptance into that institution. And so they got kind of a bad rap by especially international students who saw it as just paying for two more semesters but not really receiving a tangible benefit.

John:That particular program was a very short course, just more of an orientation to the differences in the culture of American college education. It was just a short program to reduce some of the shock and to help prepare people for the difference so they could hit the ground running without getting a bit behind in their work.

Peter: Yeah, I think that approach is absolutely positive and something that would be of great benefit to the international students, but again, if it has no credits, and then the funding for that type of program becomes very difficult, because it’s not sustainable in the long run, a lot of the time,

Rebecca: Is there a role that institutions could… should… play in establishing relationships with potential employers or regional companies that might make it easier for students to find placements after graduation.

Hayley: Working in an international office, it’s not traditional for international advisors to maybe reach out to employers on behalf of students, but if an employer were to ask a student a question related to their visa status, or maybe related to OPT or CPT, that would be somewhere where an immigration advisor on a campus can step in. Something recently that the SUNY Oswego International Office did, was we actually heard about students receiving lots of questions from their employers about what it means to be an employer of somebody who is working under CPT authorization or OPT authorization. And so our office actually took the initiative to make a specific web page for those employers for these basic kind of Q&A, frequently asked questions, that we do receive, and it’s actually had a very positive impact. And we’ve received a few compliments from some employers about how this did assist them, and they learned some new information about really what it meant to be a student on OPT or a student on CPT from the perspective of an employer.

Peter: And that more broadly, with all of these workforce development initiatives that we’re seeing take root across the United States, I would say that there’s an increasing expectation that higher education institutions are more directly involved in the transition of their graduates into the workforce, and that they are playing a role in making sure that students, regardless of what major they’re choosing, are being prepared for some sort of future within the economy. And I think that there is some resistance to that, because it challenges some of the foundational ideas about what higher education is about, or the purpose of a higher education institution. But I don’t think it’s something that higher education institutions are going to be able to escape. With the huge amount of money that people are investing in a degree there is an expectation that there’s going to be a return on the money that students put into that and higher education institutions are going to be held accountable if students are not able to be successful after pursuing their degree.

John:Are there any other things that you’d like to share about your study with our listeners?

Peter: The thing that really jumped out to me is as someone in the past who has done primarily quantitative research focused on international students, it was nice and refreshing to focus more on the individual lived experiences. And what really stood out to me was how similar the experiences were between international students and what is recorded in the theory about local domestic students in the United States, and so they’re having these same sort of identity development phases, or they’re going through a lot of these same sort of experiences. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s layered with these other things that are going on that really add a little bit of depth and complexity to the types of things that are happening to the international students here in the United States.

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

Peter: I would say this study focused on Central New York in particular and so the next logical step would be expanding it out further to other regions of New York State, or to other regions of the United States in general, to make sure that my model holds up according to other experiences in other regions of the country and in private and public and even parochial higher education institutions within the United States. So grasping at the diversity of experiences that exist within U.S. higher education, and making sure that that’s captured in the work, and then moving beyond just defining the problems and the experiences towards highlighting or spotlighting solutions to these issues or concerns that we’re learning about as we’re studying the experiences of international students here.

Hayley: Yeah, and to kind of add on to what Peter was saying, by bringing to light or highlighting or making awareness of the shared experiences of international students, because I think it’s very important to acknowledge that international students still touch just about every office on the campus the same way that domestic counterpart students would. And so this is not just something that maybe international student advisors or individuals who work with international students on a daily basis should focus on, this is something that kind of has stakeholders on all ends of a campus. And so by spreading the awareness or making others known of these challenges that international students face, I think solutions would become more prominent.

Rebecca: Well, thank you both for getting us to think a little bit more about our international student population.

Peter: Oh, thank you so much for having us, and we really appreciate the opportunity.

Hayley: Yeah, thank you so much.

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

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

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352. Enhancing Inclusive Instruction

Posted in diversity, equity, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, race, racism, reflective practice, social justice, teaching
July 31, 2024

We often don’t have the opportunity to hear directly from students about inclusive teaching practices. In this episode, Tracie Addy, Derek Dube, and Khadijah A. Mitchell, the authors of Enhancing Inclusive Instruction, join us to explore how student perceptions of inclusive teaching practices align with the growing consensus on what constitutes inclusive teaching.

After serving as the Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning at Lafayette College, Tracie will be transitioning to a new role this summer as the Director of the Institute for Teaching, Learning, and Inclusive Pedagogy at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Derek Dube is an Associate Professor of Biology and the Director of the First-Year Seminar Program at the University of St. Joseph in Connecticut. Khadijah A. Mitchell is an Assistant Professor in the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in the Temple University Health System and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Temple University College of Public Health.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: We often don’t have the opportunity to hear directly from students about inclusive teaching practices. In this episode we explore how student perceptions of inclusive teaching practices align with the growing consensus on what constitutes inclusive teaching.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guests today are: Tracie Addy, Derek Dube, and Khadijah A. Mitchell. After serving as the Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning at Lafayette College, Tracie will be transitioning to a new role this summer as the director of the Institute for Teaching, Learning, and Inclusive Pedagogy at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Derek Dube is an Associate Professor of Biology and the Director of the First-Year Seminar Program at the University of St. Joseph in Connecticut. Khadijah A. Mitchell is an Assistant Professor in the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in the Temple University Health System and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Temple University College of Public Health. Welcome back Tracie, Derek, and Khadijah.

Derek: Thank you so much.

Tracie: Thank you.

Khadijah: Thank you so much.

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

Tracie: I am drinking tea. And I love that I’m drinking it from my Tea for Teaching mug that John gave me at the POD conference in November. And the tea that I’m drinking is just a simple kind of peppermint tea.

Rebecca: Sounds wonderful, and in the best mug possible. [LAUGHTER] How about you, Derek?

Derek: I’m just drinking water. But I would also like to shout out to my mug, which is actually a mug that I recently received from an instructor in my first-year seminar program here where the second semester of our first-year seminar program is a service-based learning course. And this mural that you see on the mug, and also behind me today, is one that their class created as a means to, as it says, inspire and engage and unite the globe around topics of digital and media literacy and things like that. So shout out to the mug, more so than the beverage within the mug.

John: It’s a very impressive mug and image behind you.

Rebecca: And something good to drink to, for sure. [LAUGHTER] How about you, Khadija?

Khadijah: So, I am drinking organic spearmint tea, and my mug has my name on it and in the spirit of inclusivity, this is probably the first thing I’ve ever had with my name on it. [LAUGHTER] When I go on vacation, I never get a keychain. So I’m very excited to drink the spearmint tea out of this mug.

Rebecca: I love a special mug. John and I don’t really have special mug.

John: Well, I do…

Rebecca: Oh you, do. Right.

John:…from the SUNY Oswego School of Ed, because we moved to a new recording room that they’ve loaned to us after we lost our other one. And along with the room, we got a tea mug, a nice insulated one.

Rebecca: And what kind of tea are you drinking?

John: In line with what we’ve just heard, I am drinking a peppermint spearmint blend today.

Rebecca: I missed the mint protocol today, unfortunately.

John: You didn’t check the calendar?

Rebecca: I didn’t. I’m sorry. [LAUGHTER] But I have a nice Jasmine black tea this morning, which feels nice and springy.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your new book: Enhancing Inclusive Instruction: Student Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Advancing Equity in Higher Education. Your previous book, What Inclusive Instructors Do, was the basis of a very well received faculty reading group that we ran at SUNY Oswego, in collaboration with Jessamyn Neuhaus at SUNY Plattsburgh. So this book is a superb follow up. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this new book and how it connects to your earlier work?

Tracie: Absolutely, John, pleasure to do so. So when we think about inclusive teaching, and when I think about it, I would say in general, we know that instructors started at different points in their journeys. And when we wrote What Inclusive Instructors Do, we really knew that it will be really helpful just to have the voices of instructors who do that work, and their thinking about how they think about it, their mindsets, their values, etc. But also kind of distill it into some principles and practices that were very practical, because we know that that speaks well to instructors, but also that would allow them to reflect on their teaching. So after What Inclusive Instructors Do, we knew that instructors aren’t the only voice, right? [LAUGHTER] So we also knew that how important it was to really get students involved and students seeing the benefits of inclusive instruction, how did they experience these spaces in terms of their sense of belonging, welcoming environment, the feelings that it’s equitable or fair as well. So that kind of elicited our next step to really do a study on students and to find their perspectives. And a couple of things that we were able to do with this study, which I think is really helpful and useful for anybody, whether they’ve read What Inclusive Instructors Do or not, is we were also able to identify and ask students aspects according to what are the pitfalls? What have you seen not be inclusive? So that emerges kind of more strongly also in this book than the first book, for example. So we were able to really capture their experiences and these are students from a variety of institution types. They’re coming from a variety of classes they’ve been taking, various identity backgrounds, etc. So it really feels like now we’re talking about students like students [LAUGHTER], it’s their voice in this book. So Enhancing Inclusive Instruction, basically is just that, so that we can have a more comprehensive picture understanding of an inclusive classroom. What does it mean to students? What does it look like for instructors? And the beauty of it, and this is something that I’ve been speaking about a lot is, how are these alignments? What are the alignments between these two perspectives? What are the differences between these two perspectives? And how can we use this wider body of knowledge by having these viewpoints to really inform our practices in what we do in the classroom. So in general, both books, you can read both, you could read one, either/or, but they really were meant to really support inclusive instruction, no matter where an instructor is in your journey.

Rebecca: As a user experience designer and interaction designer, I really love the very student-centered or audience-centered nature of this book, and really bringing those voices to the forefront. Could you tell us a little bit about how you found the student participants to participate in your project.

Derek: So much like we set out with the goal of hoping that our teaching is as inclusive as possible, we also wanted that to be the case for our study, and our recruitment in the voices that we were hearing back from. So we made extensive efforts to have as broad a population be able to give us feedback, to participate in our surveys and our interviews. And that’s an important part, there were opportunities for our student respondents to reply via survey or via a virtual interview where they could potentially even go further and have deeper conversations around some of the topics if they wanted as well. So in order to recruit, after many collaborative meetings between myself and Tracie and Khadija, we came up with a broad spending plan to recruit students through using connections that we had, various educational listservs like POD, social media. We directly communicated with various institutions across the country, their teaching and learning center specifically, but also faculty that we knew that were invested in this type of work. And this included institutions at the community college level and research intensive institutions, liberal arts, HBCUs, colleges for students who learn differently, and basically any type of college you can think of. We also did lean on and take advantage of an opportunity to leverage technology through cloud research, to expand our reach as well. And through all of this, we did end up with well over 300 responses from various students when looked at geographically or institutionally that were very diverse. And we felt good with that as a basis for which to move forward.

John: One of the things we really appreciated when we were running the reading group was the reflection questions you had embedded in what inclusive instructors do. And this book also contains reflection questions spread throughout each of the chapters. While most teaching centers do encourage faculty to engage in reflective practice, it’s nice to see that embedded in the books that they’re reading. But might this be even more effective when faculty are reflecting on the student voices that make up so much of the focus of this book?

Khadijah: Right, so one of the things that stood out to us, when we did survey the inclusive instructors, there was a particular quote saying that inclusive teaching is a perpetual work in progress, informed by research, dialogue, and reflection. And when we think about that, in the context of incorporating student voice, it’s a perfect example of this. So when we think about research, actually collecting data from our students thoughout our courses, and I mean that as a community of inclusive instructors, and really fostering dialogue, and to be honest, what we found from what students say it is, that dialogue means we have to be willing to share and discuss and actually negotiate the space in our classrooms. And when we think about reflection, thinking that there’s no one set of practices for every inclusive instructor that we can act, and we’re not superheroes. So you can’t do all things, but you can do what you can to be responsive to your learners’ needs at the same time. So with that being said, when we came up with these reflection questions, and actually thinking about one of those quotes from the instructor, we saw that there were some mirroring with the first book in terms of course design, and creating a welcoming environment and conducting the course. But really, we saw that there were these 13 key themes, and that, although sometimes they reflected what we saw in the first book, we actually saw new themes emerge. So we really wanted to write reflection questions that captured that, that would help you delve deeper in thinking about the student perspective. And I think to echo something that Tracie mentioned, we really thought about potential pitfalls with these questions that we wouldn’t have thought if we didn’t speak with the students from their perspective to basically avoid certain types of things that may not have been the best for course design or maybe didn’t make everyone feel welcome, or when conducting the course. So that was very encouraging, the way that we could tailor these reflection questions based on what the students said.

Rebecca: And I love that so much. One of the tools that you developed and described in the book is the Protocol for Advancing Inclusive Teaching Efforts, or PAITE. Can you describe this instrument for our listeners?

Tracie: Sure. So the Protocol for Advancing Inclusive Teaching Efforts is a classroom observation protocol that enables instructors, in a formative way, low stakes, to obtain feedback on 15 specific instructional behaviors that are considered inclusive, equitable types of behaviors. And this protocol actually emerged from my work. And it’s a lot of what I’ve been doing in my own work is really thinking about tools that can support our instructors in building more inclusive classrooms. And so this PAITE actually originated from that. And we co-created it with students. So the student partners that work on a lot of the inclusivity efforts that I’ve done at my institution, basically supported this work and helped us measure reliability, et cetera. They were like, you know, the researchers, they helped us think about and devise it. So this particular protocol, I think, has been pretty impactful. We’ve done hundreds of observations with it at the institution that I was previously at. And thinking about all the debriefings, and all the feedback, it really supported instructors in thinking about their inclusive teaching practices. In fact, I like to share some of the responses that I’ve seen or heard them have around it. Some of them and even some of the student partners will actually, in future classes, they’ll say, “Am I doing this?” “Am I doing that?” They’ll actually reflect on the codes that are embedded within this protocol and continue to think about their practice. And that’s actually a very positive outcome of this. If they’re actually putting it in their awareness, awareness is critical for knowing are we actually doing these things that we say or hope we are doing in the classroom, and that has actually helped them really think about their teaching differently. And then some of the students said that actually, when they go to their own classes, they’ll start to think about the codes, because they’re so immersed in actually doing a protocol or conducting it with their partners as well. So that has been really great to see. And so we included it in the actual book, it has like a separate methods kind of paper, or how we developed it. But in the book, it really talks about how it can be used, and how it aligns a lot of the behaviors, and I’m actually doing a lot of this interesting mapping, align with what the perspectives of the students are, and also our instructors in What Inclusive Instructors Do. So it provides a really beautiful way to think about your teaching and monitor your approaches, reflect on your teaching, by actually having that data from your actual classroom. And I think it’s just really been helpful. We’ve embedded it in a variety of different academies and institutes, and different programming at my previous institution.

John: So you mentioned the themes that have arisen from the student interviews. Could you talk a bit about those themes?

Khadijah: Sure. So we saw 13 themes. And interestingly, seven of them centered on inclusive course design. So I’ll elaborate on the two that were the most prominent. We were really interested and surprised to see that maximizing student engagement from the first assignment and throughout the course. So the student has highlighted the importance of that first assignment, and several of them, they really believed that it helped them have a high degree of engagement. But also it was important that it required little content mastery, and built upon their existing knowledge. And there was a lot of positive feedback from successfully completing that first assignment. Students referred to short-term as well as long-term positive emotions from that first assignment. So that was really interesting. And group work… we often think about group work in higher education as a seminal active learning strategy, different learning teamwork, and things like that. So a lot of the students also echoed that, that it maximized the engagement. But what we saw them speak about was the pitfalls from their perspective with the group work, but in particular, those students that were neurodivergent and had disabilities. And so some students along with autism spectrum disorder, and also attention deficit hyperactivity disorder mentioned that, in that particular context, they didn’t feel most engaged with that. Student choice was very prominent. We talked a lot about: flexible deadlines were really important, individual student preferences on assignments and exams and accessibility needs and I think many of us are going to talk a lot about mental health and student well being. So that was very clear there. So those two were some of the key things, but also, including course policies that respectfully consider student time, structures that are easily followed and designed for student success. And students really wanted to encourage feedback on the instructions, diversity of materials, and finally, accounting for the type of course delivery. So I think in a post-COVID19 world, they talked about the importance of in person and hybrid and online themes. So that was the last theme that we saw in that regard.

Rebecca: When you quote students, you include references to their identities. And when faculty first start teaching, they sometimes assume that students in their classes are maybe just as they were as a student, but the mention of the diverse student identities in the book, hopefully help [LAUGHTER] remind faculty about the diversity of their students, and may also help encourage faculty to use a version of the “Who’s in class form.” Can you talk a little bit about that?

Derek: So with Inclusive teaching, I think identity is a key word to be keeping in mind, this concept of identity, this concept that everybody that enters the classroom has their own unique identity that brings with it a wealth of assets, but also potentially some personal bias. And this goes for the instructor just as much as the students if not more, and with the role the instructor is playing, it might be most important there to acknowledge it. So why we include the identity information that our student respondents shared willingly within their surveys was to that reason, for some of our faculty, for our readers, for our instructors, to acknowledge that the students that are responding are not identical to us when we were students, or us as we are now. But also beyond that, to acknowledge that no two students are the same. And we’re seeing different identities across these student respondents. And with all of this in mind that even the idea of teaching to the average student, well, there is no average student really, and that creates significant issues, to the idea of inclusive teaching. So for all of these reasons, we did think it was really important to include those identity aspects of the quoted students that was shared. We think this helps frame the quote, with some context, some important context, and hopefully also makes the quote more real for our readers. This came from somebody, a real person, a real student. So I do think, to your point about the “who’s in class form,” and things like that, that once we as instructors recognize and are aware of the diversity in our student populations, it becomes much more clear that getting to know our students is critical to teaching inclusively, and to including them in the learning process. So you mentioned the who’s in class form, which was part of the first book, and that’s certainly one way to do it that we’ve had a lot of success with. I’ve personally used it for years now in every class that I’ve taught since its development, and had just great personal experience and positive feedback from the students. There was a study that was published that showed student perception and instructor perception also very positive for the who’s in class form. So it’s a tool that we share, because we want it to be available for instructors to use, they don’t need to reinvent the wheel in this situation. It’s a great way to start from the very beginning from the first day like Khadija was mentioning with that first assignment being important… also, that first day, that first interaction, that first relationship building step to be one where it says, “I want to get to know you because you matter in this classroom.” So that’s one tool that we offer up to our readers and want them to be aware of, but there are other ways to do it as well. And I think that it’s important for instructors to think critically about their classrooms and their institutions and their contexts and determine what works best for them within their class to get to know their students.

John: You mentioned the importance of the context for instructors. And one of your chapters in the book focuses on providing advice for historically excluded instructors and their allies, because faculty are often in a very different context in terms of how students perceive them and how students perceive their identities. Could you talk a little bit about some of the things that you emphasize in this chapter?

Tracie: Yes, perfect segue. So in this chapter, we really wanted to emphasize that we see you, we hear you, like understanding instructors from historically excluded backgrounds can have different experiences in the classroom, as you mentioned, John, a bit, but also to give some advice and encouragement and support for how to still do this work because we know that a lot of instructors even from historically excluded backgrounds, in even my experiences and me being one [LAUGHTER], we know that there’s a lot of investment in this. There’s a lot of investment and then the importance of this. So some of the advice we give is general advice. What we know that students really appreciate in general and then also some really concrete advice to really support them in having the evidence that they are teaching well. [LAUGHTER] So the first thing to really think about and we talk about in this section is just care, like, how do we demonstrate care for our students, and regardless of whatever identities, care is critical. We also talk a little bit about other types of strategies. Some of them may or may not resonate with folks, again, all of the stuff we give as options to really think about, to experiment with, to practice with, to really think about what makes sense for you. So we give a couple of examples from people who’ve actually been doing this work as well. So things that have been published around storytelling, thinking about your story and who you are, what you choose to share with your students. And you might withhold some things, you might share some other things, and there’s good reasons for that, depending on your identity as well. We also talk a little bit about engaging your allies and advocates, because you really want to have people in your departments, and at your institution, who really value and can speak highly of your teaching, they know that you’re doing a good job, and they can advocate for that. So engaging them in various ways is important. We have these great tools we talk about, the PAITE, etc. So being able to actually have data that actually shows that you are doing things that align with what the research and evidence says can support students and their success in the classroom. So collecting that information, and just making sure you have it when you need it. And just for your own practice is also really critical, I think, for instructors, in this way, too. So those are just a few of many types of guidance that we do give in this section. I think it’s really important to consider what makes the most sense. I will say, in working with instructors, and also thinking about myself as a black woman teaching as well, it’s so contextual. It’s just like you can’t say that this will happen in this course, or this or that with this instructor. But we know that there’s a lot of variation that can happen. And I think a lot of these different guidance points can really help equip people to really think about what makes sense for them in terms of how they engage with Inclusive teaching practice. And the last thing I’ll share is that even in What Inclusive Instructors Do, if we break down and disaggregate the instructors a bit, we see a lot of instructors successfully talking about doing this work from historically excluded backgrounds. And so we know like it’s happening, we do it in our classes, as well. So this is not being meant to be like discouraging at all, but a very encouraging chapter. And just having some tools and equipment to kind of continue so that you also can be seen that way at your institution and you have that information.

Rebecca: I love these themes of reflection and data and being able to tell your story of who you are as a teacher and why you’re doing these inclusive practices and that there’s evidence that it’s working and supporting your students. Chapter 10 of your book focuses on a topic that we’ve certainly talked about a bit on this podcast, and it’s all over the news and conversations in higher ed, which is AI and instructional practices. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways in which generative AI can support an equitable learning environment?

Derek: I think it’s a really important topic right now. And on the ground, what I hear most commonly instructors talking about, and faculty talking about are the challenges that AI presents us around commonly topics like academic integrity, like, “Oh, here’s my assignment, my students are just going to go to [insert AI platform here] and complete that assignment and then submit it. And it’s hard for me… the tools for understanding if that occurred or not, can be challenging still at this point.” But I think what our chapter wanted to do more than focus on those challenges is kind of flip the table on that and focus on what are the potential benefits, like you mentioned, to increasing equity in the classroom and inclusivity in the classroom? And they are manifold, when you take the time to actually look at it and think about it. And I think the chapter goes over a number of examples to show how this can be done. In terms of benefits that we see AI being able to be leveraged with in the classroom, incorporating and developing more efficient learning experiences is certainly one of them. It can kind of balance prior knowledge gaps that students come with to the classroom by being a tool which can be used for brainstorming and ideation and things along that line, so that maybe a student can go to a platform with a particular question or broad topic and use that platform as a tool to help kind of narrow down something that they want to explore more deeply, get some ideas that maybe they didn’t have the knowledge that they brought with themselves to class to come up with that idea on their own, but now they can get there, and it can kind of even up that playing field a little bit. There’s also additional benefits to multilingual learners in terms of helping learn the language that their course is being taught in, writing more fluently and efficiently, and better understanding written material that’s present. It can help personalize learning in a really equitable way. There’s a portion of the chapter that speaks to the idea of using AI as an additional support for overcoming kind of the muddiest points in a classroom. So if an instructor is either directly asking students what is the most challenging topic, what is the muddiest point, those points could then be used and imported into an AI platform to help navigate those situations, or it could just be pointed as a tool that students could use on their own when they come up with their muddiest point and when they find a topic that’s challenging for them. Now, of course, all of this has to go within the concept of how reputable is the response that we’re getting, how trustworthy is the output of these different platforms. But that also actually leads into what a really potentially beneficial assignment tool would be with this, which is the idea of using these platforms, seeing what their responses are, and then having the students kind of fact check and revise and edit and think critically about those responses. And there’s an assignment there where students can essentially take a prompt, import it into an AI platform, see what they get back, and then the assignment is actually go through this, revise this, edit it, fact-check it: “What would you change?” And that can be a really great way to enhance the critical thinking and evaluation aspects that we’re really trying to build in a lot of our students with, again, narrowing and balancing what’s needed for kind of background knowledge coming in. So there’s these and many other mechanisms that are talked about in the chapter, including ones for, as instructors it can be a tool to brainstorm ideas for: “What are the most inclusive ways I can teach on this topic? Give me a list of 10 of these?” And then the instructor can look through that list and say, “Hey, which one of these might work best for my class context? And how can I adapt that to work for me?” So there’s lots of ways in which AI can be a really positive tool, as long as we use it in that way, and are appreciative and recognize the potential challenges that it also faces.

John: It’s certainly a bit of a challenging time in terms of professional development for faculty, because as you said, so many people just say, “this is just another tool for students to cheat,” because they haven’t really played with it that must themselves, they haven’t really seen the potential. And I think that’s something that all teaching centers are going to have to continue to work on quite a bit to help faculty become more aware of how these tools can be used to complement other forms of learning, rather than as a substitute, which is what they’re concerned about. So in addition to your two books, what are some other strategies that faculty can use to help create a more inclusive environment in their classes? I know, you’ve talked about some of them, like the “Who’s in class form,” and so forth? But what are some other ways that faculty can work to become more inclusive? Or what are some of the things faculty who have not thought about this much should start focusing on most immediately?

Khadijah: That is a great question. I think, yes, we have a ton of great resources, like books and tools like PAITE, and our lived experience. There’s something that I really think this particular study and process and talking to students that really resonated with us is thinking about nonverbal communication. Often people think inclusive teaching takes so much effort, but even thinking about your personality, you’re smiling. So for example, smiling, warm and welcoming tone, being thoughtful about tone. For example, students say not getting angry. So to throw back to something that Derek mentioned, is thinking about your instructor background, and what type of strategies or the nonverbal communication are you communicating. So that is definitely easy if you’re in person. [LAUGHTER] But if you’re online, some things that I think you can think about is the use of thumbs up, clapping, things like that. Something that recently came up for discussion was when you are online courses, do you tell your students to change the tone of the thumbs up so that everyone is reflected in that space and welcome? Students have actually responded that they feel more included in that space with nonverbal communication. So using emojis in emails, some students actually thought that made their instructor more approachable, but I will say, that being an instructor in 2024, you have to watch that. There is a pitfall there. Studies have shown overuse of the emojis, induce sometimes less confidence in the instructor. I think, being mindful of any strategy that you can use to be mindful of the nonverbal communication. But the verbal communication I’ll say, unequivocally, I keep going back to this… [LAUGHTER] the mug… it is really important to know names, say names correctly, and to use chosen names. So name tents can help with that, using an annotated class roster, seating charts, photos, mnemonic devices, student introductions, those things are concrete. And I think the last thing I would say, is actually telling jokes. So a lot of instructors use humor in college and university classrooms. So that tends to go over very well, there’s a positive effect on students in the learning environment, and making people feel included. But again, a word of caution, thinking about how the joke can land. So it could be very powerful in that way. But also wanting to be mindful if you’re going to, in fact, use that particular strategy to make your students feel welcome.

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

Tracie: I’ll share a little bit about some of the things that I’m working on. So with regards to my scholarship, I kind of hover between teaching and learning and also educational development in general. And so a couple of things that are exciting, I think, for the future is we’re currently proposing a multi-site PAITE study. And so that study will dig deeper into the impacts of, we’re hoping, of the PAITE in the classroom. Since now, we’ve been using it a lot, but we don’t have all the data from the classroom and the experiences of students and the instructors. So we’re going to be doing a multi-site study in the next year or two. So hopefully, you’ll see that come out. Another project that we actually just finished off, a smaller project, we talked about group work, students experiences with group work, and that being a challenging area. So we implemented an intervention this past year at my previous institution, in collaboration with another center, and several classrooms, several instructors in their classrooms. And so we did collect some data on that. We just are synthesizing it. So we’re gonna hope to write that up and also share the resource that we use, that was an intervention that we created that students use to help empower them to really have more effective group work experiences, more inclusive, more equitable kinds of experiences. And then a couple of things I’m working on in an educational development realm, we just collected data from the POD community and outside on educational development right now in our times, so we can track how it changes. So we’re in the process right now, this summer, of starting to write the book, which will be the next one… it’s written like almost every 10 years educational development in the age of… and we’re gonna ffill that in [LAUGHTER] based on the results of the study, and then some other educational development things. And lastly, as was mentioned earlier, I’m moving to a new institution. So I’m going to launch a new Institute for Teaching, Learning, and Inclusive Pedagogy. So that’s going to be very exciting to really think about what’s next there, it will be launching the first center at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and it will have embedded within it all of this inclusive stuff. So there’s so many things to bring there and to increase and expand.

Derek: Yeah, for me, I mean, I think coming out of the work of this study that led to this book, I think where I am is continuing to spread the word, but then also putting it into action. And that means personally, for me, in my own teaching, taking all the things that I learned through this process of listening to students, working with my fantastic colleagues, and writing this book, and having conversations like these, putting that into action, and making sure we’re walking the walk, so to say, because that’s the only way this actually happens. And in my role at the University of St. Joseph, again, I’m not only a instructor, a faculty member in the biology department, but I’m also the director of the first year seminar program here at USJSJ.. a two-semester long program. It’s a true first year program, where the first semester is a three-credit course that is kind of half transitioning to college and half an academic component where the students get to dive into college learning. And the second semester is a one-credit course where it’s service based and meeting the mission of our university to engage in compassionate service. So as in my director role, I am thinking a lot about how do we help students transition to college in their first year? And I think there’s a lot that we can gain from listening to students. And that was reported out in this book that can be leveraged there. So building in some of these ideas of really getting to know the students, engaging in opportunities for student choice within our first-year seminar program itself as well, kind of coming out of the work of this, I’ve created a college success portfolio that we’re implementing in the program. We implemented it for the first time this past year that ties a lot of these features in that allows students to talk about right off the bat, their first assignment is nothing to do with the content, but it’s the “Why are you here? Why college? What are your goals, both in college and out of college? And this is something that the students can succeed with, right away to kind of set that form and let them know that their instructors here at the institution care about them as learners, and that the learning that they’ll go through will be personalized for them. So something that we’re piloting here at the University of St. Joseph trying out but long term would be something that we would hope to share out with the greater community and hopefully help those first-year experiences at institutions around the nation and globe.

Khadijah: Well, for me, there’s one thing that really struck me as we worked on these two projects, was that inclusive teaching is very similar to inclusive research mentoring. And so I do a lot of research mentoring. There’s a lot of teaching strategies in dealing with different types of learners in a research laboratory setting, so I’m really interested in going in the direction of thinking about how some of these strategies and things that we learned translate to a research mentorship context. And also, because I’m at an institution now that has graduate students and postdocs, really train the next generation of inclusive instructors, and particularly those that are in STEM spaces. So when I’m working with a mentor to our postdoctoral advisory committee here, and trying to get them excited about being inclusive instructors as they transition to their next phase.

Rebecca: We’re looking forward to hearing about all the things that you’re continuing to do because you’re making an important difference in our teaching and learning community. Thanks for joining us.

Khadijah: Thank you.

John: It’s great to see all of you again and talk to you again. And this time, we shouldn’t let it go quite as long as between our last discussion and this one.

Derek: Thank you so much for having us again. It’s been a pleasure.

Tracie: Yes. Thank you.

Khadijah: This is so fun. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Either that or you’re enough to write books faster, one or the other. [LAUGHTER]

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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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349. Growth Mindset Messaging

Posted in continuing-generation, diversity, engagement, equity, first-generation, first-generation students, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, large-class instruction, motivation, STEM education
July 10, 2024

First-generation college students, on average, have lower GPAs and higher dropout rates than continuing-generation students. In this episode, Elizabeth Canning, Makita White, and William B. Davis join us to discuss a growth-mindset intervention that has eliminated this equity gap in a large STEM class.

Elizabeth is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Washington State University. Makita is a graduate student at WSU’s Experimental Psychology Program, and William is a Professor of Molecular Biology and the Interim Vice Provost for Academic Excellence and Student Achievement at WSU.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: First-generation college students, on average, have lower GPAs and higher dropout rates than continuing-generation students. In this episode, we discuss a growth-mindset intervention that has eliminated this equity gap in a large STEM class.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Elizabeth Canning, Makita White, and William B. Davis. Elizabeth is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Washington State University. Makita is a graduate student at WSU’s Experimental Psychology Program, and William is a Professor of Molecular Biology and the Interim Vice Provost for Academic Excellence and Student Achievement at WSU. Welcome back, Elizabeth and Makita, and welcome, William.

Bill: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

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

Elizabeth: I am drinking tea. I’ve learned from past podcasts with you that I should bring some tea along. So I’m drinking some sweet and spicy black tea today.

Rebecca: Sweet and Spicy… [LAUGHTER] sounds interesting.

Elizabeth: It has some cinnamon and some orange. It’s very good.

John: Very nice. And Makita?

Makita: I’ve got classic Earl Grey today.

Rebecca: Can’t go wrong with a classic. [LAUGHTER]

John: And Bill?

Bill:I have a Raspberry Zinger herbal tea today.

Rebecca: I’ve moved on to Awake tea… this time of day. [LAUGHTER]

John: We recorded another podcast much, much earlier today. So that’s probably needed a bit more. [LAUGHTER] And so that I won’t be awake all night tonight, as I have been for much of the last couple of nights, I have just a pure peppermint tea.

Rebecca: Probably a better choice for this time of day. [LAUGHTER]

John: And for this time of the year.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your March 2024 study: “Growth Mindset Messages from Instructors Improve Academic Performance Among First-Generation College Students,” which is quite a mouthful. [LAUGHTER] But before we discuss the study, can you talk a little bit about the difference in outcomes between first-generation students and continuing-generation college students?

Makita: Sure. So when we say first generation, we usually mean someone who’s the first in their family to attend college. For this study, we specifically defined it as a student for whom neither parent has earned a four-year college degree. And these students typically have to face and overcome a lot of social and cultural barriers in order to be successful in college. And although almost a third of the people who go to college are first-generation, they don’t always seem to do as well as continuing-generation college students. On average, they tend to have a little more difficulty adapting to college, they typically earn lower grades and they have higher dropout rates. They also act a little bit differently, they’re less likely to do things like go to office hours, or communicate with their instructors, whether that’s by email or in person to seek clarification on course materials. And just in general, they tend to be less likely to try to access helpful academic resources when we compare them with continuing-generation college students, which would be students for whom at least one parent has earned a four-year college degree. And on top of all of that, the students are also usually… I mean, they have to be… dealing with having less familial guidance than their peers do when it comes to navigating higher education. So if you’re a continuing-generation student, you have a parent who might tell you something like, “Hey, it’s a good idea to go to office hours,” or “You should be asking questions” or “there’s a financial aid department,” important stuff like that. They also may be dealing with a mismatch between the values and culture that they grew up in, compared with the values and expectations of an American university, which is typically very individualistic and may not be as supportive as what they are used to. And of course, they’re also more likely to be working, living off of campus, and they usually get less financial support from their families. But there are other factors that may exacerbate the difficulties that they’re dealing with. And this study is about one of those.

Bill:And one of the things that, just for context at our local institution to keep in mind, is WSU has a lot of, for lack of a better term, brand loyalty. It was not uncommon for me in my class to have fourth generation Cougars. And if you think about that legacy of your great-grandparents had attended this institution, as had other people, that sort of familial knowledge that gets passed along, is a huge benefit for that population of students as compared to the first-generation students as Makita was talking about.

John: One of the things that you mentioned, Makita, was differences in help-seeking behavior. And one of the studies on that is one that we talked about with you and Elizabeth in an earlier podcast, and we’ll include a link to that in the show notes. Could you describe this current study?

Elizabeth: Yeah, so this study we conducted in 2021, I believe. It was the second semester online, so the pandemic year. I know we’re all sort of crossing out that memory from our minds… [LAUGHTER] …that whole year. As instructors, it was a little tumultuous. But Bill and I got together and we designed this study together in his class. He was teaching at the time the introductory biology class at WSU. And what we decided to do is test out some actionable techniques that instructors can do to communicate a growth mindset to their students. So a lot of the research that my lab does looks at how growth mindset messages impact different students from different backgrounds. And at this time, there was a lot of suggestions about how to implement growth mindset ideas in your class, how to change course material, how to integrate it throughout, but there wasn’t really any experimental evidence of specific strategies that instructors can do. So we decided that we would just test it out in Bill’s class. So what we did in this study is we randomly assigned everybody in the course to one of two conditions: a control condition or a growth-mindset message condition. And after the first two major exams in the course, students received an email from Bill, and in the control condition they received a message that is pretty typical of an instructor after an exam has been conducted in their class. It says things like: “exam grades are posted online, here’s how we calculated them,”
“here’s what it means,” and then “feel free to talk to me in office hours, or ask questions about it.“ In the growth mindset message condition, we included all of that information, but we also included a fairly lengthy paragraph… I’ve gotten comments on… but it’s a big chunk of a paragraph that basically says, in Bill’s words, “Here’s what I believe about student performance and exam performance and improving in the class.” And there we integrated growth mindset theory, we talked about how abilities can be improved, we talked about how academic struggles are normal to experience, and that this struggle is part of the process of learning, that is something that is controllable. That you can put in effort that you can use different strategies to make improvements. And I think we used, Bill, if correct me if I’m wrong, we started with a draft of this email that you had already been doing in your class. And we just sort of infused it a little bit more. So Bill really wrote like the first draft of it, and then we kind of went back and forth a little bit to edit it and infuse it a little bit more with growth mindset. But it’s really written in the voice of the instructor. After we implemented this email after the first exam, we did it again after the second exam, changing the language a little bit. We assessed their performance across the semester. So we looked at their exam grades, we looked at their final course grade, and we found that students who were in the growth mindset condition earned higher grades in the course. And this was predominantly driven by first-generation college students. So first-generation college students performed much better in the course, when they received those growth-mindset messages from the instructor.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the effects and how significant they were?

Elizabeth: Yeah, so when we look at the group differences in the control condition, what we find that’s very consistent across big STEM courses across the university, that continuing-generation students are getting better grades than first-generation students. So in this course, they’re earning about three-fourths of a letter grade higher than first-generation students. So this is a really, really big gap between the continuing-generation students and the first-generation students. It’s not specific to this one course. So we see this in a lot of different datasets. But what was really remarkable in this study is that that difference in their grades was completely eliminated in the growth-mindset condition. So first-generation college students earned about three-fourths of a letter grade higher in the growth-mindset condition compared to the control condition. So this is a pretty large effect on final course grades. And of course, it’s pretty significant in terms of the curriculum that they’re a part of. Bill, if you want to talk a little bit about the students who took this course and how it plays a role in their career trajectories.

Bill:Yeah, thank you for that. I was looking forward to jumping in a little bit. And this is a little bit about my journey too, in this course. So, at this point, just for context, this was the 16th semester that I had taught this course. Largely I had been either the sole instructor or I was the primary instructor of record for the course. It’s taken by about 450 to 550 students each semester, little bit of differential between fall and spring in size, over 50 different majors, or pre-major students take this class. It’s nominally a freshman majors biology course. But there’s a substantial number of students who are neither biology majors or life science majors. And there’s a sizable number of students who are not freshmen. So, in reality, the highest population of my course normally were sophomores, freshmen were the largest population in that spring semester. And that was pretty typical, because it is oftentimes taken as the second semester of an introductory biology sequence. So yeah, and to be honest, over the years before this study, I had been trying to narrow those opportunity gaps between first-generation and continuing-generation students. I knew they existed. I had done many things with the course experimentally over the years, and never had really closed that gap. This was one of the first times, if ever, I saw that gap completely close in anything that I tried, and I tried tinkering in the lecture in the lab, big changes, small changes, a lot had gone on before this.

John: You mentioned that the class is normally about 450 students. Could you tell us a little bit more about the specific course in which you implemented this? You noted that this was during the pandemic. Was this offered remotely? Was it synchronous? Was it asynchronous? And how many students were there in this particular sample?

Bill:So, the course was taught in a synchronous Zoom manner. So both the lecture and the lab were taught using zoom. I believe, if memory serves, I had the largest Zoom Room on campus that semester. I can’t remember the exact number, I want to say my enrollment that semester was somewhere close to 550, or 600

Makita: The final sample is 417, I believe.
Bill:417. That’s right. That’s how many students, so it must have been around probably 450, at the beginning of the semester, or something like that. Yeah, we had synchronous Zoom every day with students. In fact, I learned pretty quickly how to crash Zoom my first semester I taught remotely. [LAUGHTER] So by then, it was a little bit more of a pro, and at least knew how to keep it running for 50 minutes at a time.

Rebecca: And true badge of honor.

Bill:[LAUGHTER] Well, there are many lumps that we took in the pandemic and learning how to teach and Zoom was one of them. [LAUGHTER]

John: I had 350 students in the fall of 2020, and it was not my most enjoyable teaching experience. What are the factors you controlled for? Because you did control for some other variables to separate out the effect of the growth-mindset messaging?

Elizabeth: Yeah, so we controlled for three things in our analytic models. We controlled for students’ prior college GPA… so this was just their self report… GPA that they’ve had in college. Since this was in the spring semester, all the freshmen had had a semester under their belts at that point, to have an idea of what their college GPA was. We included this just because we were looking at performance. So we wanted to filter out or control for their prior performance, that’s a big predictor of their performance in the class. We also controlled for their self-reported personal mindset beliefs. So we asked the students themselves, what do you believe about the nature of intelligence? Do you think it’s something that can improve? Do you think it’s something that you’re just born with? So we measure their own self-reported mindset beliefs, and we control for that and all of the analyses, because we want to look at the effect of the intervention above and beyond student’s own beliefs about ability. And then the last thing we controlled for was their race or ethnic status. So what they self reported to us on a survey. Here, we controlled for that because there is some overlap between race, ethnicity, and first-generation status. We did look at the different groups separately, we don’t have enough power to really look at race ethnicity as a moderator at the intervention. So we control for it in our analyses to look at the effect of first-gen status above and beyond race and ethnicity,

Rebecca: I can imagine, as an instructor who’s fiddled quite a bit in their class to overcome these equity gaps, that it might have been a little surprising [LAUGHTER] how much of a change happened with such a relatively small intervention.

Bill:It was shocking. It’s funny, because one of the things that Elizabeth has really talked about is how we took materials that I actually already possessed in some ways, and modified them slightly in some cases, and more radically in others, but just that transformation was enough to start to really make an impact. And you could see it happening. And that was amazing to me. I remember when I halved my opportunity gaps in my class with an intervention. And I remember dancing and celebrating, [LAUGHTER] and then this one was just on that scale. This was huge and amazing to me.

John: One of the interesting things in this study is you were looking at the effect in terms of grades on subsequent exams, but you didn’t find much of an effect on the second exam from the first intervention. But when you had two of those messages coming out, that’s where you found the relatively large effect. Why do you think the second message was having more of an effect than just a single message?

Elizabeth: Yeah, so we have a couple of theories. We think that one reason could be that they just need the message more than one time. So they need two doses or more than two doses to sort of really get people’s attention and make them change their behavior. That c ould be one reason. Another reason is that it might be enough to just have one message, but it would take time for behavior to change in order to see a difference in their performance. So it could be that after the first exam, they started engaging with the material differently and then that then sort of snowballed to affect their third exam scores, and then again, their final course performance, but we don’t really know exactly what’s going on. Another reason could be that towards the end of the semester, students get a little antsy, and they start waking up a little bit to, “Oh, I should probably be doing something different if I want to have a grade that looks like this.” So it could be timing, it could be dosage, it could be the effects take longer to materialize in terms of performance changes. One of the interesting things that we found here in this dataset is we did try to look at behavior in the way that we had access to, so we pulled all of their activity on the course website. And this semester, our campus was using Blackboard as the course sites. And we pulled all of the Blackboard data. So we looked at whether students in the growth mindset condition were engaging with Blackboard differently. And we found that they were. Students, on average, who were in the growth-mindset condition engaged with the course material 40 instances more, on average, than students in the control group. This is around a 12% increase in webpage engagement. So after they get this message from the instructor saying that intelligence is something that can grow, abilities can improve over time, and here are some strategies that you might implement to realize those changes, they’re going to the course website, they’re clicking on things, they’re re-reading their notes, they’re looking over the course lectures, they’re engaging more with the resources that are posted there. And then not surprising to any instructor ever, [LAUGHTER] that when students are engaging with the course materials that then lead to greater performance in the class. So we found a mediation effect through their behavior with the course material that was posted online. So this is one example of the behavior change that I was talking about earlier, that when they get this message, it can be inspiring, it can inspire a different type of behavior that can lead to better performance in the course.

Rebecca: Those are really strong click rates generally, [LAUGHTER] especially when we’re often complaining that students don’t read our emails or messages. [LAUGHTER]

Elizabeth: Yes. So, we did look at differences in Blackboard in terms of clicking on course material versus going to the page where all their grades were, like the gradebook. And we didn’t find any differences on their engagement with the gradebook. So it wasn’t that they were just tracking it more or anything like that. But it seems to be the case that they’re actually engaging with the substantive course materials more, on average, in the growth- mindset condition.

Rebecca: It’s just incredible. [LAUGHTER] Can you talk a little bit about… and we’re hinting towards this, obviously… what does this study suggest that faculty and institutions can do to improve outcomes of first-gen students, or maybe even, Bill, what you’ve continued or started to do?

Bill:I think, for me, what I took away from it was being very intentional with my students in communicating what I believe about them. And I mean that in the spirit of the old NPR show, or the segment that they used to do, you know, “This I believe,” where people would have those small snippets. I felt like this intervention was something along those lines where I could be authentic in communicating what I truly believed about their abilities. And I did it in a way that, with some small tweaks, obviously had these much deeper and larger payoffs. And I think that’s one of the real nuggets of wisdom here is that when you want to transform, and have better student outcomes, you want to narrow these opportunity gaps for students from certain backgrounds or experiences when they come in. Oftentimes, you don’t have to throw away what you’re already doing. Oftentimes, you already have nuggets of really important things that you’ve built over time. And all you need to do is to work with somebody who sees things just a little differently and can tweak them with you. And I think that partnership with Elizabeth and Makita was really critical for me. They were able to take things that I already had, and show me a different way to just modify what I was already doing. That messaging would go out to every student after that time point. When you see an effect that size, it almost becomes ethical to in fact, it is ethical, in my opinion that you don’t preclude any student from experiencing it. So that should be the way that everyone should be communicating with their students, in my opinion. And you want to make sure that it’s authentic as well, because I started with a set of materials that I had already written and sort of came from my heart, my own experience, that made the authenticity, I think, real whereas if I would have tried to have said something to students that I really truly didn’t believe about their abilities, I think they would have sniffed that out in a heartbeat. And we probably wouldn’t have seen the effect that we did.

Rebecca: It’s amazing what a little bit of intention can do in the design of something, especially because we often don’t realize how big of an impact a simple communication might have. We almost think of it as like a throw away, or a quick thing you might be doing, but you add a little intention to it, and it starts having a really different impact.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think you mentioned earlier that students might not read the email, you might think that they’re not going to engage with it. And we also thought that, [LAUGHTER] so we think that in designing this intervention, we were really drawing on a lot of the intervention research that had been done previously. So research on wise interventions, mindset theory, all of that was integrated into the design of the message itself. So we started with Bill’s original emails that he was sending out to students and the messages that he had already curated for his class, and timing it in a time in the class in which students are receptive to that information, I think, is also really key. So we don’t know this empirically. But I would guess that if we were to send that email a couple of weeks before the exam, it would not have the same kind of impact. We send it directly when that performance information was posted online. And that’s when students are questioning themselves. They’re saying, “What does this score mean? Does this mean that I’m not good at this? Does this mean that I can continue? Does this mean that I’m smart or not smart? …and that uncertainty, that is the right time to infuse your message as an instructor to counteract those uncertain messages about ability. So I think the timing really matters. I think authenticity, like Bill said, really matters. Makita and I have been working with other institutions to implement a similar type of intervention with instructors. And before we did that Makita did a bunch of focus groups with the students at these institutions and showed them the messages that we used in Bill’s class, and we ended up changing them quite dramatically. The students gave us feedback like “nobody here would ever say something like that,” or “here’s what you need to say to reach students here in my class,” or “here’s what I will be receptive to.” So students in different contexts are going to respond to different messages. And so you really do want it to fit your own class, how you would speak, how you would talk to your students, the needs of the students in that moment might be different from the class they’re in. So it really is not a copy and paste type of situation where you were gonna copy what we did here and put it in your class. I think you do need to kind of go through the process of generating it for yourself and your own students.

Rebecca: I could imagine there would be an element of needing to evolve it over time, too, as your student population changes, and as you change as a teacher.

Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely.

John: One of the things that I think is particularly nice about this study is that we see higher DFW rates by first-gen students in STEM classes in particular, and so many students end up leaving STEM fields that they intended to major in in their first couple of years. And that’s where the rate of return to education is the highest. And in general, first-gen students come from lower socioeconomic groups and lower family income groups, and if we do want to see more equity in outcomes, getting more first-gen students into the STEM fields could do a lot to help reduce some of those equity gaps in terms of overall outcomes.

Elizabeth: You mentioned the long term nature of these effects. I think it’s a great question. I think it’s something that we’re currently looking at in a project that we’re doing that’s funded by the National Science Foundation, where we’re looking at how these interventions in an introductory course can change career trajectories, that when you get a B instead of a C in a major introductory course, that’s gonna mean something different to that student, that’s going to set them on a path of following that next course sequence, that next step. So that’s the question that we’re asking and the research that we’re doing now, and hopefully, we’ll have some answers in a few years.

John: Peter Arcidiacono at Duke had done a study on the decision to stay in STEM fields. And he did look at some of these questions in terms of the effects on major choice based on the grades that were received. We can share a link to that study in the show notes. In the IRB proposal, did you include the possibility of following up these students in terms of their outcomes a few years later, in terms of retention rates for the students?

Elizabeth: That’s a great question. I believe in terms of IRB, we had students consent to their academic records. So we should be able to go back and look at transcripts from the students who participated in the class. We could look at course taking, we could look at graduation rates, we could look at major. If these students were freshmen/sophomores in 2021, then we’re probably around the time where they would be finishing up so maybe in the next year we could.

Bill:I was just thinking the same. Now’s the perfect time to go back and take a look, because we’ve had enough time since the intervention to see what’s happened. And actually I was gonna go back to one of your earlier points. You were talking about statistics earlier. Basically, this is really the only way that we’re going to increase the number of STEM students going forward. If first-generation students at WSU are 40% of our population today, that means if we don’t improve their outcomes, then we’re going to continue to see the declines in STEM outcomes and STEM graduates that we are trying so desperately to fight against, and also, we’re not going to have the representation in our STEM graduates of the population of the US that we want to see.

Rebecca: I think in addition to the growth-mindset piece, I’m sure that the authentic nature of the messages also just showed deep care. And that can be really important for first-generation students who need that ally or advocate for them in their college journey. So I can imagine those messages coming from Bill in Bill’s voice that make them feel like “Yeah, you can do this, I care about you,” from that perspective is also really important.

John: And there was a study done by a couple of economists, entitled “My Professor Cares,” where they did follow up students four years later, and they did find a significant effect in retention rates four years later by a similar type of intervention, I don’t think it was quite as much growth-mindset focused, but just sending a signal that the professor cared about the students outcomes, a very simple message, made a significant difference in student’s grades as well as longer term outcomes. So it’s nice to see more studies of this, especially focused on issues such as growth mindset.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

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

Elizabeth: So Makita and I and our lab have been working for the past couple years on following up on these data in different institutions. We used this study as pilot data in a grant application. And now we’re sort of scaling up to other institutions. We have a project with a really large HBCU, a Hispanic-Serving Institution, WSU is continuing to be involved as well, an Asian and Pacific Islander Serving Institution to where we have a number of instructors who vary in different characteristics, different class compositions, and we’re looking at these instructor messages in an experiment in these different contexts to see what matters. Does it help students develop their own growth mindset? Does it change their behavior? Does it work in some contexts, but not others? Do the instructor characteristics matter? So far, in the past two years, we’ve collected data from around 10,000 students who have been involved in this intervention project, and we’re currently in data analysis phase. So stay tuned for future studies and papers that come out of that data set.

John: Makita?

Makita: Well, what’s next for me is Elizabeth and I are actually going to meet right after this to do a debrief and to discuss some of the analyses that I just ran on a study that will be involved in my dissertation.

Rebecca: And how about you, Bill?

Bill:For me, I think about: “How do I proselytize about this work?” Because I think about what little changes make a big difference in an institution. We talk a lot about student retention, we talk a lot about student outcomes, we talk about creating the global citizenry that we want to see emerge from higher education. And the one experience that every student has in common, whether they are a first-generation a continuing-gen, or from some other background, is they have to take classes, and they have to be in classroom environments every day of the week, for the most part, over a course of four years. And I think about what would it look like to have interventions like this, that have evidence that back them, that students get inoculated with repeatedly over multiple time points with different voices, and that faculty engagement in the process of helping our students become better, to find success and to move forward in their careers? To me, that’s the magic of this. I’ve been talking to other people about it and I think about what would a curriculum look like that had small things like this? And how could it transform what we do? And I think that’s a vision that I can buy into, and I hope others are gonna come along for that ride.

Rebecca: I think the scope of the interventions that you’re talking about, that have this kind of impact, are really easy to buy into. Because usually you’re thinking about some drastic, giant investment of time, is what most people are thinking about. And that often is what prevents action from happening. So I’m excited, excited to share this and to hear what comes of your bigger study.

John: And one thing we appreciate is when we see things like this posted on social media so we can hear about it [LAUGHTER] and we can share it out a little bit further. [LAUGHTER] And I hope you’re presenting this at various conferences to reach a larger audience.

Elizabeth: Yeah, we will be presenting some of this work at SABER this summer. So that is the Society for the Advancement of Biology education research, and we’ve presented it in some other psychology conferences throughout the past year as well.

John: Excellent.

Bill:And I gave a plenary talk at the summer educational meeting for the ASBMB, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. So I gave a little preview of what we had found. And that generated a lot of discussion and excitement, actually people asking for additional resources and ideas and things. So I think there’s a receptive audience out there.

Rebecca: That’s wonderful.

John: Well, thank you for joining us. It’s always great talking to you and it’s great to hear about this newest study and to meet you, Bill. We’re looking forward to hearing more about how things go in the future.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

Rebecca: I hope you’ll reach out when your next study is done. [LAUGHTER]

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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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347. CATs and AI

Posted in access, clickers, diversity, edtech, equity, feedback, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, teaching
June 26, 2024

Classroom assessment techniques, initially developed at a time when chalk-and-talk instruction was the norm, helped to shift the focus from teacher-centered to learner-centered instruction. In this episode, Todd Zakrajsek joins us to discuss how generative AI can enhance these techniques by providing more immediate feedback.

Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published five books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is a 3rd edition of Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, with Thomas A. Angelo.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Classroom assessment techniques, initially developed at a time when chalk-and-talk instruction was the norm, helped to shift the focus from teacher-centered to learner-centered instruction. In this episode, we explore how generative AI can enhance these techniques by providing more immediate feedback.

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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 Todd Zakrajsek. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published five books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is a 3rd edition of Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, with Thomas A. Angelo. Welcome back, Todd.

Todd: Thank you, Rebecca.

John: It’s nice talking to you again. It’s been a while. I think the last time was last summer.

Todd: Really? It seems like yesterday. Time goes by. It was last summer. You came to my office and recorded.

John: That’s right.

Todd: It was fun. You left me a really nice set of tea. Wooh.

John: And a mug.

Todd: Yes, I have a mug for the show. [LAUGHTER]

John: Speaking of teas, [LAUGHTER] today’s teas are:… Todd, are you drinking tea?

Todd: Every time I’ve been on this program I’ve been drinking tea and I’ve had some pretty exotic brands and blends but, I’m sorry, today I have water, the lightest of all teas.

Rebecca: It’s a very light tea. I have English Tea Time tea.

John: I have Lady Grey today.

Rebecca: That’s a good choice.

Todd: Alright, I think I came in third place.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss classroom assessment techniques. The first two editions to this book were written by Thomas de Angelo and K. Patricia Cross. In last week’s podcast, Tom joined us to discuss the origin of this book, where you joined as a contributor for the current third edition of this classic book. What was your reaction when you were first asked to join in this project?

Todd: Well, this is actually kind of a funny one, because it goes back to Linda Nilson and Teaching at its Best. And Linda was retiring, and the publisher, Jossey-Bass wanted to do a new edition of Teaching at its Best, and Linda says “Why don’t you see if you get Todd to do it and I will work with him on it and do it.” And we did it. And we got the book done a little bit early and on schedule, and it came out very, very well. So there’s a little plug for that book there. And it must have been about two months later, I had called them and said: “If you find another project like this, I love working with people like this.” And a couple of months later, I got a phone call and they said “We have another project we’d like to potentially have you work on” and I said: “Great, what is it?”… and they said: “Have you ever heard of the book Classroom Assessment Techniques?” And I held it together, and I said, “Well, yeah, yes, I have.” And they said, “Well, we thought it’d be helpful given what you do and what Tom does and everything, is maybe the two of you could work together on this book.” And so he talked a little bit about what there was and everything, and I hung up the phone and did a little happy dance because this book was one of the most influential books in my entire career. But the way the universe works is I ended up doing this one because of the work with Linda Nilson’s. And so that’s how I got started on this.

Rebecca: That’s amazing.

John: And, I agree, that is an excellent book as well. So you’ve got two classic books that you’ve worked on recently.

Todd: It’s really surreal, you know, a first-generation college student and every once awhile is kind of like I just can’t believe this is happening. But it was a really good project.

Rebecca: When did you first start using classroom assessment techniques in your classes? You mentioned that this book was influential.

Todd: I taught my very first course in 1987-1988. This book came out, second edition, 1993. And I was using it pretty much the moment it came out. Somebody had pointed it out to me and I didn’t know anything about classroom assessment techniques, and then I started reading through it and picking some out. I thought it was genius. Much like periodically, what you’ll do is you look at something and think this is ridiculous that nobody started doing this before. In some respects, it’s not that hard, right? You ask people questions, and you find out if they’re learning. It just took Tom and Pat to come along and say, “Why don’t we come up with strategies to find out if they’re actually learning.” So I think it was really influential for me because it kind of struck that chord with me that I always believed we should be finding out how much students were learning instead of focusing on teaching. But that’s not what was going on at the time, everybody was focused on teaching-centered educational practices.

John: What do you find most valuable about these classroom assessment techniques?

Todd: It’s interesting, because there’s a couple different levels. The one that’s really valuable, of course, is you find out if students are learning. Secondarily, you can find out if you’re teaching well, and you can change your teaching practices based on what they’re learning and based on what’s going on. But I’ll tell you the real reason I think this is really, really valuable is it addresses equity issues very, very cleanly. We walk into classrooms with all kinds of preconceived notions and stereotypes and implicit biases. And it’s really, really easy to think that a student’s struggling for a certain reason, unless you ask them. And so, for several of these strategies, I think it’s great because I’ve had students that have been practically sleeping through every class and then I started doing the classroom assessment techniques and he had some of the best responses, this one student did. And I would just totally blown away that this person was just processing it to such a level and I had a preconceived notion based on where the person sat and how they dressed and how they acted in class. I didn’t think they knew anything or they didn’t think they were learning and they really were. So I think it’s huge for equity and overcoming some of the biases we have in our classrooms.

Rebecca: That’s a really good example to underscore the importance of that. We had the opportunity to ask Tom what his favorite classroom assessment techniques are. So I’m really looking forward to asking you the same question: what are your favorites?

Todd: I’m one who says over and over again, in education, that we should always be careful about absolutes. Like, there’s never a strategy that always works. There’s never a type of student that’s always the best. Any situation can change. So there’s like 55 CATs in there. And I listened to the program with Tom and I heard him say that he didn’t have his favorites. And then he quickly picked out his favorites, and I’m sure it’s the same with his daughters. [LAUGHTER] So I have three girls, you know, they changed the favorites, I would definitely go with the standards of the muddiest point minute paper, those two are the big ones. Everybody’s done a minute paper, probably at some point. The muddiest point I like, which was the adaptation. And if you haven’t heard this show with Tom, make sure you listen to that, because he explains that very well. I think I like exam wrappers where you go in and kind of have the students talk about the exam experience. But for me, there’s several CATs that are based specifically on assessments. And it’s the thing that we almost never ask students for, and it’s the thing they can give us the best feedback on. So it’s like, when you have group activities, it’s an assessment on how well the students perceived that the activity worked for them. So instead of me just saying, we did a great group project today, you ask the students: “Was this a good group project?” There’s assessments in there about learning interests, what types of things you’re interested in, your study strategies, exam strategy. So you can ask students those things. And I think those make great classroom assessment techniques, to find out the processes that you’re doing, and how the students are receiving those.

Rebecca: Those are good opportunities to respond in the moment in your class, but also probably plan in the future too, to know what to do next time around, perhaps.

Todd: Yeah, I think specifically for exams. And one of the favorite questions I’ve always had on exams, because the students would get to a point where, and I got this, because of one of the assessment techniques I’d use early on, is students always were frustrated that there was something on the test that they studied really, really hard for, and it wasn’t on there. The problem was, it wasn’t always the same. So the students all had different things they studied. So because of collecting that information, and finding out from the students as they were frustrated, I started adding a new question at the end of every exam worth the same as some of the other questions there, was: “Please describe in detail something that you study that I didn’t ask you about on this test.” And students immediately felt better about the exams, they were happier with the test, because they didn’t spend four hours memorizing something that they perceived wasn’t valued on the test, even though the real reason for all of this stuff is life, not the test. But again, that was one from just asking the students: “What do you like and not like about the test?”

John: That’s a really great application of a technique that I hadn’t thought about, I can see how students would feel that their voices are being heard with that type of thing.

Rebecca: …or that their efforts were validated.

Todd: They got their points for their studying, and it just really seriously changed the affect of the class.

John: In the last podcast we did with you last summer, we talked a little bit about how teaching has changed from the time when you and I both started teaching, and this book was written back around the time when you and I were both relatively new at this. What role do you think this book has played in that evolution of instructional practices?

Todd: Well, first of all, I do want to acknowledge and help people just really understand the difference between 1993 and 2023. Some of the things we took out of the book was “display your results on an overhead projector,” there was no mention of the internet anywhere in that book, because the internet wasn’t here yet. Just stop and think about that for a second. So it was a very different time. A lot of heavy lectures. I mean, a lot of times people were lecturing, there were other activities, or other strategies, there was group work and role plays and those types of things. But primarily people are lecturing, because that’s just what people did, primarily. And so the role that this played, I would say, I don’t know if I’ve ever said this before. I think this book had a bigger influence on higher education than any other single book that’s out that I know of. There are some really, really good books out there. But this fundamentally changed the game. Because what it did was it started asking students about their learning, which means it started to really shift the focus from teaching to learning. This did happen to come along, by the way, if you really look at dates, the whole concept of really pushing active learning in higher education, at least in the United States, really took off in the mid- and late-1990s. So 1996 to 1998, we started seeing people like Richard Hake, do some huge studies about this. American Association of Higher Education was changing their themes from taking teaching seriously to taking learning seriously, all of those things happened about three to five years after this book came out. So I think this was the impetus for a huge, huge aspect of the whole push for moving from teaching to learning. I think it had that big of an impact.

Rebecca: In recent months ChatGPT has hit the news everywhere. We’ve heard all kinds of reports in higher education journals and things. accreditation organizations are talking about AI. And many faculty members are also talking about potential harms of AI or other see benefits. What do you think the impact of AI tools will be on higher education practices? …speaking of evolution… [LAUGHTER]

Todd: I don’t have the statistic right in front of me, but there was one I did a presentation just recently on how long it took to get to a million users. And they were talking about some things like Netflix and other things of taking two and a half years, and then six months and stuff. And I believe ChatGPT was five days. So it’s pretty incredible. So Rebecca, I love the question. I think this is a huge issue. The two biggest things that I heard out of the gate was: number one is how are we going to ever have students do their own work again? It was all academic integrity all over the place. And I couldn’t help but talk to a couple of people who were really freaking out about it and I said, “You should really read some of the research about academic integrity already and the proportion of students who are doing things that they shouldn’t be doing, so to speak, there.” And so that was it… academic integrity. And number two was like, “What kind of assignments should we do now? How do we structure assignments to be meaningful?” And I find this fascinating, because they weren’t talking about the learning process. And I still, to this very moment, I’m just starting to hear it now, but I have not heard much of anything about how can we use generative AI to influence the learning process in a positive way. And so I think that’s the huge thing we need to be looking at. So I guess the people who do know me, know me as the individual who writes a lot about helping students to learn and teaching tips in the classrooms kind of things. I think from a cognitive psychologist’s point of view, we can look at some of the foundational things like: we know that repetition is really good, we know that the process of explaining something really helps because it’s a chance for you to practice at retrieving information. We know spaced recall is really good. And there’s all these things out there that can kind of do that. But I’ll tell you, and I’m coming right back to the CATs, but ChatGPT and some of the other generative AI has some phenomenal opportunities. We know that teaching this is good. So I opened up by ChatGPT 4 the other day, and I was practicing and I typed in: I need to learn about metacognition, would it be okay if I taught you metacognition, and then you tell me how good of a teacher I am. And the chatGPT says, “Yeah, this will be fun. So let’s get started.” And I said, “Okay,” and so I explained metacognition. And ChatGPT asked me some questions like, “Well, what does this mean? And what does that mean? …and I acted just like I was teaching somebody. And then when I was all done, I said, “If I were a teacher, right now, how would you grade me?” And I did not get a good grade [LAUGHTER] which was kind of disconcerting there. But I said, “Why did I not get a good grade on this? And then it explained a section that I had completely forgotten, because I was doing this off the top of my head to try it. So I went back and explained that. And then ChatGPT says, “That’s much better.” I think that’s phenomenal. Another one, I will not get into details, but I typed in, or I gave it the prompt… it’s all about the prompts folks… “That I just learned in my introductory psychology class at a medium-sized, midwestern university. I’m a C-level student who’s worked really hard, and what I just learned were about persuasive techniques. Could we pretend we’re on a car lot, and I’m a salesperson, and you’re going to buy a new car, and you think you want to buy it today, but you’re not going to rush into anything.” And ChatGPT says, “This sounds like fun. Tell me about your best selling model.” [LAUGHTER] And I proceeded to explain all these things. And the scariest one is I said, “This Ford van right here has excellent ratings for safety.” And it said, “That’s particularly important for someone with a loved one and two furry friends.” So the learning possibilities are all over the place for this thing. And so for classroom assessment techniques, this is great, because we can actually teach students some strategies, how in the classroom, how to assess whether they’re learning. We can replicate these and have them do them with AI. So we could use AI to do things we couldn’t do before. But we can also do it to model things for students that they can do on their own. So I think there’s some really, really interesting possibilities coming along.

John: And one interesting one is if you ask ChatGPT for your biography, you may very well turn out to be a car dealer in the Midwest.

Todd: You know what, I’m just gonna jump in there and say that is totally true when ChatGPT was about six months old, because I did it. I said, “Write a letter of recommendation for Todd Zakrajsek… and you probably saw this, why you even mentioned it… and I think it had 19 things I counted in there and this term of hallucinations, but 17 of the 19 things were wrong, including where I went to school where I worked and everything else. That was when ChatGPT was a baby. I asked it the same thing just recently, and it was scary, how close it just nailed everything. But yeah, it was for a while.

John: It’s improved quite a bit, but one of the nice things about it is our students come in with really diverse backgrounds and we can provide supportive materials for students when they have some gaps in their prior learning. But, ChatGPT offers the possibility of having something that’s completely personalized to their needs, so that they can ask questions that are specific to the issues that they’re having trouble with, and not what we might have guessed they’d be having trouble with. So, it’s something I’ve encouraged my students to use in my intro economics course, and they appreciated the fact that they were encouraged to use it,

Todd: I think that individualized instruction is going to take on a whole new level. And so I think that’s going to go crazy. But I will say this, and I think it’s extremely important. I’ve been in higher education for 40 years, I have never seen a bigger possibility for an equity gap to be the widest chasm it could ever be. I think we got equity problems that are down the road. And if we don’t pay attention, it’s going to be awful, because I believe that generative AI is going to be a huge learning aid, and it’s going to help us with lots of things, for the people who have it available to them, they will skyrocket and be able to do stuff; the people who don’t have it available… reliable internet, a good computer, or some kind of a device, a safe place to sleep at night… those individuals are not going to be on that tract and they’re gonna get separated. Right now, there’s a couple of grade differences between people who are privileged and not in some classes. That could widen so much. So I think, everybody, we just got to really be careful about how to make sure that this was as equitable as possible for everybody.

Rebecca: Higher ed leadership at various colleges and universities are certainly dancing around the idea of AI and what kinds of policies and procedures to put into place. What would you advocate for? What would you encourage faculty members to advocate for to really make sure that equity is addressed?

Todd: I think one of the very first things we need to do is teach students how to use it properly. Because one thing we know about learning is, the more you know about something, the easier it is to learn something related to that topic, whatever the thing is, and what that means is that learning is not linear, it’s curvilinear. The more you know, the easier it is to learn something, which means you’re going to know more quickly, and as you know more quickly, you’re going to be able to learn more quickly. And this is why people struggle at the beginning with things and then all of a sudden they take off. So if some students know how to use the systems, and some don’t, that’s where we’re going to run into some huge issues. So I think one of the things we can do is teach students how to use it to help you, and when to be careful that it’s not going to help you. The movie Wall-E is a great thing to be keeping in mind. If you haven’t seen the movie Wall-E, it’s a plug for the movie Wall-E, it came out a long time ago, but that concept of the humans that had everything done for them ended up becoming just blobs that laid in chairs all the time, and I think our brains basically do that. If students use AI to do their work, they’re not going to develop critical thinking skills. If students use AI to help them to practice at retrieval and spaced out practice and do those things, they could become very good. So I think schools need to be careful about helping students to understand how this can really help them. That’s the first thing. Then there’s the obvious, helping people to have access to technology, we could have labs open, we could have laptops that we can loan to people, reliable internet, we could have rooms that we keep open 24 hours a day, keep them 24/7 there. Some libraries during exam time, they don’t close for like four or five days. We could have rooms in the library that people can come and have safe spaces to study and work, reliable transportation is going to be an issue, we’re just gonna have to work out how do we address those issues. It’s gonna be a challenge, but we need to be thinking about it.

John: The use of classroom assessment techniques has been growing steadily since they were first introduced. And each time there’s been new educational technology, it seems to have led to an increased use of those. During that time, we’ve seen the introduction of relatively low-cost computers, computer networks, the internet, mobile computers, and so forth. How do you think the availability of generative AI will affect the use and value of classroom assessment techniques.

Todd: I think there’s a couple things that’s going to really, really change. I think for classroom assessment techniques, number one is we’re going to be able to individualize a little bit more. So we can tailor… we don’t have to ask the same question of all the students, we don’t have to look for all the same type of responses. So we can think about it a little more creatively in how we can use it, almost like an individualized instruction toward classroom assessment. Probably the biggest thing, though, overall, is it’s going to allow us to just process data in numbers and levels we’ve never seen before, and particularly free responses. In the past, we’ve often ask closed-ended questions just because if you’ve got a class with 400 students, you can say: “On a scale of one to five, to what extent did today’s lecture help you to understand something?” And the students can pick a number, we could drop that into an excel sheet, or anything, and come up with a number very quickly. We can now say on a muddiest point, “What are you still struggling with?” Take 400 responses, dump them into a generative AI program and have it spit out five things within 30 seconds:” Here are the five things your students are struggling with.” So I think it’s going to allow us to do more qualitative types of things very quickly. And I totally get that this is not hardcore qualitative research with good analysis of the data. But for what I need in the classroom, I think we’re gonna be able to get those responses very quickly and in real time. So what that means is, we’re actually going to be able to ask something like a muddiest point at halfway through the class, and then I could have the students do a quick think-pair-share, while I analyze the information and a matter of three minutes later, they come out of the think-pair-share, to talk a little bit about what they talked about. And then I could say, I see that you’re still struggling with these concepts, so let’s revisit these things before they ever leave the room. That’s never been possible before.

John: When I’ve been teaching classes of two to 400 students, I’ve used the free response option and word cloud. But the word cloud is just highlighting individual words, the ability to do analysis in more detail is going to be incredible. And I think most providers of response software are working on introducing AI, and some of it is expected to be available fairly soon.

Todd: Oh, there’s some great stuff come check GPT and some terribly scary stuff at the same time. By the way before I forget this, because I have to tell you this because I have ADD, that’s one of my favorite phrases.ChatGPT 5,, one of the things I read about that’s going to be coming up fairly soon is the ability for it to launch his own AI’s as needed. That’s the one that we’ve been waiting for, and thinking, “Hmmm, that’ll be interesting.” But yeah, I think that the ability to read through and look through the information is just going to be a game changer. And online synchronous/asynchronous, face-to-face in all environments. We could look at stuff in asynchronous environments in ways we haven’t before as well. I could look at different ways that students are responding, I could ask classroom assessment techniques. In fact, they’re in the book. We have several of them… ways to use CATs in asynchronous environments, and AI is changing how we’re doing it.

Rebecca: Can you give an example of how that’s happening in asynchronous environments?

Todd: In terms of asynchronous environments, everybody likes to go to discussion boards, but quite frankly, discussion boards are boring. We could have students generate something like the script for a commercial. And after they do that, I could have the CAT that comes in to say, “To what extent was this helpful in the learning process for you?” And the student, as they’re developing this thing and as submitting it they could also submit, right along with it, their CAT that comes with it, and then I could be reading the CATs as they come in one by one right behind each one of them. And so the concept, there, would be kind of a real time CAT analysis that’s not waiting until there’s a whole group and then looking at the group. Because typically, when we think about these CATs, it’s like, the 400 students fill out a muddiest point and we analyze the 400 students. We don’t need to do that. In an asynchronous environment, we can have these CATs coming in and we can be analyzing them as they come in. And we could even add them to the previous ones, to group them if we wanted to. But the bigger one is, I can find out how the students are doing as they’re doing. So that’s probably one way to look at it.

Rebecca: One of the things that you mentioned in an in-person or a synchronous setting was being able to analyze results mid class. And that’s in part because a lot of our students have mobile devices and technology that they bring with them that they haven’t had before. Do you see other ways that these mobile devices are also changing the way instructors might implement CATs?

Todd: The way you just mentioned, though, I can’t think of many other than the concept of as an information gathering device. I will say, just because I happened to read this study just a little bit ago here, the devices are very interesting, in a sense that we’ve seen high schoolers tend to have the same amount of time they spent with their peers was very consistent until about 2012. And in 2012, the numbers started dropping off pretty quickly. And then COVID dropped it even faster, but the slope was already there. And the point here is that people are turning their attention to devices so much that they’re not talking to each other exhibited by when you see two people at a restaurant having dinner, and each one of them are on their device. There’s all kinds of psychology about how those things happen. But the overarching thing that’s the issue is that we’re having students at levels we’ve never seen before disengaged in the classroom, even when we’re trying to do CATs and engage. And part of that is because of the devices. So one of the things that’s kind of interesting about this is when you say: “Okay, everybody gets your devices out, and now we’re going to use them for a CAT.” And then we stick with that and how we use that data makes a big difference of whether they stick with it or go back to what they were doing. Strategically, it’s really helpful to use those devices to engage the students.

John: One concern with generative AI is many of the types of assessments we’ve used before can be answered very nicely by generative AI. What might we do to reduce the likelihood that students will use generative AI as a substitute for learning?

Todd: I think it’s really, really important to talk to students about the long-term implications. I know this is not going to be for everybody. I totally get that. But one thing I’d say to students is: “I don’t understand why anybody would run, why would anybody go jogging? You can just get in your car and get there faster.” So if you kind of pitch that to them, that idea is for most of the students, if there are any kind of health-related fields, or if they want to have a cardiac system later in life, exercise is just one of the most important things you can do for your body, by the way, in terms of that getting 150 minutes per week, and just higher respiration. If you take that away, it is bad for the human body. And so the response is the same thing is true of this. Just talking to the students. If you use generative AI to answer your homework problems, to develop the quizzes, to write a poem, and I’ve done all of these in workshops, where I’ve said to people, I can do this real quickly. I don’t care who’s in this room, I can ask you to write a short story. And I will crush you with generative AI. The problem is that, if I do that, I don’t learn how to think for myself. And so I think the biggest thing we can do for students, number one is to build community in the classroom, to number two, to tell them what this all means, and then number three, ask them, ask them, how it’s helping them, ask them how it’s hurting them, how they believe these things are working. And those are classroom assessment techniques, we can use these assessment techniques to find out to the extent that they’re doing this. While I’m on my little diatribe, we will never be at this spot again in our lives. We have just developed something that can totally short circuit cognitive processing and critical thinking. But we did it with people who have critical thinking skills and cognitive processing. So we developed something because earlier in our lives, we had to learn in the ways of joggers, we had to develop our systems. And now we can talk about the automobiles that would move as faster. The students coming along are going to step right into those automobiles, right into the AI, and if they’re never told that it’s important to go out jogging, they’re not going to develop the systems that are going to be needed later. And so again, just think about this for a second, we’ve developed a system using a system that may disappear if we’re not careful. And so I think that’s where we can change it. So it boils down to community, why we’re using it, and then assessment questions of how it can be used, and where it’s good and bad.

Rebecca: I think students really enjoy having conversations about AI and exploring how it’s useful and not. I have had activities in my class where we intentionally used AI to see what it was like and when it would be useful and also analyze where maybe they tried to use it and it was totally not helpful, and why it wasn’t. And they really appreciated those kinds of conversations and learned a lot from those.

Todd: I think the students do. And we could pick different spots in history. You go back to Socrates and his whole belief that if you write things down, it weakens the mind. It makes sense. If you have to learn it, you’re going to be much stronger than if you write it down. But I can’t imagine right now teaching without students writing things down. And Samuel Johnson came along several 100 years ago and said, “There’s ready availability of books. With books all around, why would we really need to teach this stuff, they can just go get a book.” I can’t imagine teaching without books right now. So these things that everybody got scared about, or thought that just going to change just became integrated. And when the internet came about, we talked about this a while back, in the sense that many of us were teaching before the internet actually showed up. But when it showed up the people who were teaching were freaked out. “How am I supposed to teach when the students can go and get anything they want off their computer?” And now I can’t imagine teaching without the internet. I believe five years from now people are going to say I can’t imagine teaching without writing things down, without using some kinds of print format, without using the internet, and without using generative AI. I don’t even know how I would teach without it. What that’s going to need is the same stuff we’ve done in the past, that’s how do you teach well with the Internet? How do you teach well with generative AI?

John: It’s an exciting time to be in the midst of all these changes. And it’s going to be interesting to see how we all answer those questions as we move forward.

Todd: It is, but before we wrap up, because I can tell that tone, [LAUGHTER] I want to put a general call out that there are several people who are saying: “I wish I could retire right now” or “This is a great time to retire.” The statement I really want to make is this is a hideous time to retire if you’re really good at what you’re doing. Because we have never needed humans with really good critical thinking skills as much as we do now, maybe we will later, but to date I don’t believe we ever have. And for some of the people who are saying “I just don’t want to teach anymore. This is awful…” we might need you more than we’ve ever needed you, so I don’t like this concept of the mass exodus of certain people.

Rebecca: It’s an important point.

John: One other thing I will add is Paul Samuelson once said, in describing the way in which models of the economy evolved, that “funeral by funeral, the science makes progress.” So there is the counter argument there too, that people who are very tied into the old ways of teaching do need to either adapt or perhaps they’ll be replaced by people who are more willing to try new alternatives.

Todd: Do I smell a little Kuhn in there? The revolution of science. Ah yes.

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

Todd: I’m trying to keep busy. I’m kind of on a roll right now. And I want to tell you, I’ve been writing books and the only reason I’m unhappy about ChatGPT and gen-AI come along is people are going to assume that I’m using them so that I can crank stuff out. But thus far, I have not used any of this generative AI to write any of these last books that I’ve done, these five books in the last five years or something, and enjoyed working with Tom on this one. But I got another one coming out in about four months. I just turned in the final pages for that And it’s the Essentials of the New Science of Learning: the power of learning in harmony with your brain. That book should be out in a couple of months. And so the what’s next after that, I am working on a book right now for helping with neurodivergent learners. We’ve joked around in the past, I’ve got ADHD is about as bad as it gets. If it were a competition, I could come in probably close to first place, and also on the autism spectrum just a little bit too. And when I started sitting down with some of my colleagues who also have ADHD and autism spectrum, it occurred to me, we don’t talk to students enough about these things. And I think the challenge of that is that the students believe that they’re alone, and they’re not sure they can do things. And I was talking to a student fairly recently that said, “I now believe I have a shot, here you are with a PhD, you’ve written books, if you’ve got ADHD, as bad as you claim you do, maybe I can do something.” And then that’s when I really really was getting serious about we need to help folks out. And the topic I’ve been playing around with a little bit in a couple of workshops is The Ones Too Often Left Behind as the title I’m using. And it’s the students that aren’t built for the system that we developed. And so I think that we need to treat some folks out there a little differently. And I think we can really build up the pool of intelligent folks by helping to teach the people who just learn in a different way.

Rebecca: It’s really important work to have models and put models out in front of students because they need to see themselves in whatever discipline, field, etc., that they want to pursue. I’m excited to hear more about that.

John: And when will these books be out? You mentioned the timeframe for one of them.

Todd: The Essentials for the New Science of Learning should be out in September. And then the other one, if everything goes well, is probably looking at a February date that it would probably be available.

Rebecca: Well, it sounds like we’ll be talking to you soon then, Todd.

Todd: We may be. When you got ADHD pretty bad, you just can’t really predict when that books gonna be. But yeah, I’d love to chat with you when it does finally emerge.

John: And what are you going to do next week?

Todd: You know what? You gave me a great idea. I think we should do a book on procrastinating people with ADHD. [LAUGHTER]

John: It’s always great talking to you. And we’re looking forward to each of these projects coming to fruition and we will be talking to you about each of them, we’re hoping.

Todd: I appreciate the opportunity to come and chat with you. I think you two do a phenomenal job with your interviews and the programs that you pull together on really good topics and I just am honored to be one of the guests.

John: Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah, thanks. We always enjoy talking to you.

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

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

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346. Classroom Assessment Techniques

Posted in active learning, assessment, diversity, engagement, equity, feedback, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, learning, metacognition, pedagogy, teaching
June 19, 2024

Classroom assessment techniques can be used to shape instruction to the needs of our students. In this episode, Thomas A. Angelo joins us to discuss the origin of these techniques and evidence concerning their efficacy.

Tom is Clinical Professor Emeritus and Director Emeritus at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to teaching for 40 years, he has been long involved in professional development and has served as faculty member and Director of teaching, learning and assessment centers at UNC, LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, the University of Akron, and Boston College. Tom is best known for his work with K. Patricia Cross on Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, which was first published in 1988, with a second edition in 1993.

Show Notes

  • Cross, K. P., & Angelo, T. A. (1988). Classroom Assessment Techniques. A Handbook for Faculty. Jossey Bass Wiley.
  • Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993). 2nd. Ed. Classroom assessment techniques. Jossey Bass Wiley.
  • Angelo, T.A. and Zakrajsek, T. (2024). 3rd. Ed. Classroom Assessment Techniques: Formative Feedback Tools for College and University Teachers. Jossey Bass Wiley.
  • Schwartz, Charles (1991). “An Academic Adventure.” March 4. – A description of the origin of the minute paper by it’s originator.
  • Chizmar, J. F., & Ostrosky, A. L. (1998). The One-Minute Paper: Some Empirical Findings. Journal of Economic Education, 29(1), 3–10. (the article that John referenced as his first reference to this topic)
  • Mazur, E. (1997). Peer instruction: A user’s manual. Pearson
  • Mazur, E. (2014). “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer” – a recording of a presentation by Eric Mazur at SUNY Oswego, 5/19/14
  • Fink, L. D. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Pam Hook and Josie Roberts (2018). “The who, what, when, where, and why of SOLO taxonomy.”
  • Angelo, T.A. (1993). “A Teacher’s Dozen—Fourteen General Research-Based Principles for Improving Higher Learning.”
  • Pre-order for 3rd edition of Classroom Assessment Techniques: Formative Feedback Tools for College and University Teachers.

Transcript

John: Classroom assessment techniques can be used to shape instruction to the needs of our students. In this episode, we discuss the origin of these techniques and evidence concerning their efficacy.

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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 Thomas A. Angelo. Tom is Clinical Professor Emeritus and Director Emeritus at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to teaching for 40 years, he has been long involved in professional development and has served as faculty member and Director of teaching, learning and assessment centers at UNC, LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, the University of Akron, and Boston College. Tom is best known for his work with K. Patricia Cross on Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, which was first published in 1988, with a second edition in 1993. Even if you’ve never heard of these books, you may have included some Classroom Assessment Techniques in your teaching toolkit. Welcome, Tom.

Tom: Good to be here.

John: We’re very happy to talk to you. Today’s teas are:… Tom, are you drinking tea by any chance?

Tom: No, I was drinking black coffee.

Rebecca: It’s one of our most popular forms of tea [LAUGHTER] as regular listeners know. Today have some English tea time, John. How about yourself?

John: …and I have an Earl Grey tea today.

Tom: Excellent.

Rebecca: We’ve invited you here today, Tom, to discuss the third edition of Classroom Assessment Techniques, to be published shortly. These techniques described in earlier editions of this book have been widely adopted by faculty in all disciplines at all different types of institutions. And a lot has changed in higher education since 1993. But this book is still the go to reference on classroom assessment techniques, which is pretty impressive [LAUGHTER] for a book that was published 30 years ago. Can you talk a little bit about the origin of this book?

Tom: Well, I think the origin of the book goes back to the fact that when I was a young teacher, I recognized pretty early that many of the things that I was doing didn’t work and didn’t work for my students, and that I had to accept that things that had worked very well for me as a student weren’t working for many of them. So I began to experiment with asking questions in a variety of different ways and getting students to jot down answers anonymously. And through that, I really learned more about teaching and learning, I think, than from anything else that I did. And one of the things that I learned was not to assume. So, classroom assessment techniques are things that I’m sure almost every teacher has done. But what we did in the 1980s. K. Patricia Cross and I, was to really formalize those. And we did that in order to create a resource for teachers so that they could find simple tools that would help them ask students the kinds of questions that would help students learn better, and teachers teach better, as they went along. So it really began at that time, and it was kind of an accidental start, in many ways. We were doing it as part of a big project, and what was then the assessment movement, and it just kind of took off.

John: Most of our listeners are probably quite familiar with classroom assessment techniques and have seen them at lots of workshops and have probably, as Rebecca noted before, used them in the past. Could you define what a classroom assessment technique is, for those listeners who are new to the concept?

Tom: Well, in a formal way, a classroom assessment technique is a formative assessment technique. It’s a way of gathering data to use to improve and inform practice, rather than to make judgments. So we have too, most of us, to give students tests and exams and assign papers, and grade their work, evaluate their work, for grades and marks. Formative assessment techniques, on the other hand, are tools that we use to gather data along the way, before those moments in which we grade them, or mark them, so that we can help students get ready and improve and succeed when they’re going to be graded and marked and so that we can, at the same time, find out where they are and how they’re doing in order to help them improve along the way. So they’re really ways of diagnosing, in a way, students’ learning.

Rebecca: One of the most popular classroom assessment techniques described in your book is the one minute paper. There have been many studies of the effectiveness of this technique and it’s been widely adopted in many disciplines. Why was this technique, in particular, been used so extensively?

Tom: Because it’s simple and easy to use, probably, and it takes almost no time. But seriously, the one minute paper, the minute paper was invented, to the extent these things are invented by Charles Schwartz, in the 1970s, at UC Berkeley, and he used it as both a way to take attendance (in his case, he was asking students to jot their names down), but more importantly, to find out whether students were learning from his physics lectures, in his huge physics classes, what he hoped they were learning. And that idea spread through UC Berkeley really fast. And so soon, there were dozens and hundreds of people using these two questions. And the two questions, famously, were: what are the two or three most important things you learned from today’s lecture, in his case, and what questions do you still have the end of the lecture? So students would jot these down on those strips of paper, remember, there was no internet and no computers, really, in classrooms in the 1970s. And then he would collect them, and read through a sample of the 1000 or so that he had every lecture. And from that sample, he would gather ideas about what students understood and didn’t from the lecture, and also what questions were most common. And then he would begin his next class meeting, by going over some of those points that students had had trouble with, or not understood, or missed them completely. Sometimes it happened that a 1000 students didn’t get one point that he thought was critical, and also answering one or two of the most important questions. And what he found was, he could do all of that in five minutes at the end of class, and about five minutes at the beginning of class. And I think it’s that efficiency that has made it so popular.

John: My first exposure to this was a study that was published in the Journal of Economic Education way back around the time of your last edition. I did try to find it, but I couldn’t find the citation for it, but what struck me was that the instructor had used it in one section of the course, had not used it in another section, and found that there was a very substantial difference in learning outcomes between the two groups, which he attributed to the one minute paper. And it’s been incredibly commonly used. But one of the things that really struck me is that at the time when you came out with this book, including the one-minute paper, and so many other classroom assessment techniques, most instruction at the time was the chalk and talk type where people were at a blackboard, maybe a whiteboard, if they were a little bit more advanced in the technology, where most assessment was done with high-stakes assessments. So I think your book was a fairly important factor in helping people shift to more formative assessments. Why have these techniques become so widely adopted?

Tom: Well, I think that one of the reasons why people have found classroom assessment techniques and other formative assessment techniques, there are other kinds, so useful and so important, I think there are several reasons. One is that the student body in the United States and across the world has become ever more diverse in the last 30 or 40 years. And it turns out that no matter who we are, as teachers, most of our students are going to be pretty different in terms of their experiences and their interests and their skills than we are. And that level of difference has probably grown over the years, at least our awareness of it has grown. So I think most teachers now realize that it’s very important to check in on students and see how they’re doing, before we get to the midterm or before [LAUGHTER] we get to the end of the course, and to check in regularly and not to assume that students are understanding our brilliantly clear presentations or the material that we give them, or the readings, or the problem sets, and to really check early on to see if it’s making sense to them, and what kind of sense it’s making to them. So I think that there’s much more realization of the diversity of human learning, and of our students, than there was 40 years ago or 30 years ago. And I also think that as teaching has evolved, especially as it’s become online, people have recognized that we need data. We can’t just depend on students volunteering that data, they often don’t know that they don’t understand. And that that data, used well, can help us and can help them.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that you’re talking about in terms of assumptions is reminding me of some of the conversations that we had early on in the pandemic, where instructors we’re talking about not being able to see the sea of faces to know whether or not students are learning because maybe students aren’t nodding along or providing some visual feedback, but classroom assessment techniques are really important because they allow opportunities to gather that data, which is probably far more informative than the head nodding.

Tom: I think there are maybe a couple of other things that are important about this that people discover. One is that by stopping to ask students to reflect on their learning and respond, you give them time to think. And you prompt them to think about their learning. And from my point of view, forever, the most important thing about doing this has really been to give students tools to become more aware, we could say more metacognitively aware, of their own learning, and to better take responsibility and control or at least direction over their own learning. So what I found is I’ve had many, many, many very bright students who had never been taught any kinds of techniques to think, or to ask themselves questions, or to monitor their own attention, and having those sorts of tools, those sort of metacognitive tools, I think empowers students to make decisions about their own learning, and also to improve their own learning in those areas where it matters most to them, which may not be my course.

John: One of the things you mentioned was that the one minute paper was originally developed in a class with 1000 or so students. And one of the nice things about many of these techniques is that they can scale that way. Now, there was a time when the book came out when this was all done on paper. But now we have so many electronic tools that we can use to do this. Instructors could put up a QR code with a link to a Google form or something where students can give their feedback within a minute or so or we could use polling techniques, and so forth. And many polling systems have built in one-minute questions or some other classroom assessment technique as a default strategy. So this impact has been pretty substantial. And it’s really nice for instructors, not just for students, having that time for reflection, but also for instructors to get some feedback on what students have learned. Because if you just call on students, you may happen to get the only student who understands the material responding to a question or you might get the only student who hasn’t understood the material. But with these formative assessments, you can get a good feel for where students are. And they also get some feel for where they are in a way that they might not if they would just passively sitting there listening to a lecture. So these techniques have, I think, become increasingly more common from the time of introduction. So these techniques have held up pretty well. But you now have a new edition of this book, a third edition of this book. Could you describe some of the changes in the new addition?

Tom: Well, obviously, and you’ve touched on this, technology has changed. And that’s had an impact on teaching, and an impact on learning. So one of the things that I did, in going back to do this book after so many years, was to take a look at first what was out there, what had people published on this. And there are literally about 3000 published articles of various kinds and various quality, about classroom assessment techniques. There were about 300 that I thought were of sufficient kind of quality and rigor to be able to use. And in the chapter on the minute paper, I refer to 150 articles and studied them very carefully. There are many, many books that refer to the classroom assessment techniques. And I also read [LAUGHTER] all of those references. So I took a few years to work through this material and new things were coming in all the time. So one thing that differs is that we have an evidence base across many, many disciplines for what seems to work and what seems to work well. And also much useful information on how to use these with various technologies. So how best to use formative assessment with online, fully online technologies on totally asynchronous classes. And so that’s been really valuable. And those are experiences that I couldn’t have all of those experiences. So it’s terrific to draw in those from other teachers. The other thing is people have invented new techniques or developed new techniques over time. And so in the third edition 25%, or about 15 of the 55 techniques, are ones that didn’t exist in the second edition. And that’s about one quarter of all the techniques in the new book. So one of the reasons why we have different techniques in the 3rd edition is that some of the ones in the second edition weren’t much written about, weren’t much commented on, and they seem not to be much used as far as I could tell. So I’ve picked up the ones that were most used and most written about, and most referenced so that people in different disciplines can find those techniques. And I’ve also found another 15 techniques to kind of fill those gaps and extend it a bit.

Rebecca: Your book offers many, many assessment techniques. I’m curious what your favorite few are that you’d like to introduce instructors to?

Tom: Well, just like I can’t say which of my daughters are my favorite, I do have favorites. I’ll be honest. I have always used the minute paper ever since I learned about it all those years ago, and I learned about it really when I was at Berkeley, in the mid 1980s. And I learned about it, as everybody else there did, kind of by chance, and thought, “Wow, why didn’t I do this? Why didn’t I think of this?” So the minute paper, the muddiest point, which is a variant of the minute paper, which is developed by a really famous and eminent statistician at Harvard, named Frederick Mosteller. And Fred Mosteller heard Pat Cross talk about this, when we were both at Harvard, and being the kind of person that he was he immediately experimented with it. What he found was that it was more useful for him, in his courses, to just ask one question, and that question for him was “What was the muddiest point In today’s class? What was least clear to you?” Many other people have used that as well and written about that. That’s another favorite. A third one is one that I’ve used a lot, being a statistics teacher. And that’s predict, observe, explain, which is often called POE. And that’s one that I’ve found useful in many situations. And I’ve had colleagues who’ve used that even in literature courses, and other courses where they’ll say to students, “let’s stop at this point in the book or the film, and predict what’s going to happen next, write that down, then we’ll observe it, and then we’ll try to explain why that either met our predictions or didn’t meet our prediction.” And while it’s obvious how people do that in science, and it’s part of the scientific method, it can be used in all kinds of circumstances. And it’s one that I’ve used with teachers who I’ve worked with, about classroom assessment and about formative assessment. I’ve asked them to predict what they thought would happen, then observe it, and explain what did happen and whether or not that met their expectations. And that’s been a very useful tool for me, I think, and the teachers I’ve worked with. So those are three good ones. I’ll give you one more, if that’s helpful. And that’s something that we call the directed paraphrase. So three of those four were in the first and second versions of the book, predict, observe, explain is in the third edition, but directed paraphrase simply asks the questions that are sometimes called journalistic questions, who, what, when, where, why, who did what to whom, when, where, why, and how? And it asks students to answer those questions about some phenomenon that they’re observing, or to answer them about an essay that they want to write, answer them about any kind of question. So giving students a framework of questions that they can work through, to make sure that they really understood either a book that they’ve been reading or an experiment that they’ve been doing, has been really valuable to my students. And I’ve said to them, “Look, this is something that you can adapt and take with you anywhere to use to make sure that you understand what’s going on fully. And to find out which part of it maybe you really can’t answer, and need to do some more work on.

John: In terms of the predict, observe ,and explain thing. I took a MOOC that was put together by Dan Ariely on behavioral economics. And one of the things he talked about was how he would often present the results of an experiment where the results were not what most people would have expected. But then he’d asked people for their reactions only after he summarized the results of the experiment. And they all nodded and said, “Well, that’s exactly what they would have thought would have happened.” So he started revising his presentations, where he asked people to make a prediction, and then revealed the result. And it got people much more engaged. And the same type of thing is done by Eric Mazur with his polling technique, where he asked people to answer a question where the question is not obvious and where there’s going to be some disputes. And then once they’ve committed to an answer, they work with other people and he goes through it again, with a little bit of peer instruction. But the level of engagement when students have made some type of a prediction of what they think the answer is, and then they have an explanation of what the answer is either given by the instructor or by other students, the level of engagement and interest just seems to go up fairly dramatically. So I can see how that would be particularly effective.

Tom: Yes, and I’ve learned a lot from the work of Eric Mazur, as have many others. And I think that that’s a critical thing. Because one of the things that we need to help students with, and help ourselves with, is managing our inbuilt biases and that issue of when you hear something new, feeling that you’ve always known it, even though you haven’t, is a cognitive bias that’s common, I think, to all human beings, myself included. So doing something like that: predict, observe, explain routine gives us a chance to really check and see if we know the answer. And then to find the answer, or discover an answer. And then to realize, because we have a document, we have a record, we have data about what we knew in the first instance, to recognize that we’ve learned something and what we’ve learned and that we might have been misinformed or unclear in the beginning. And I’ve suggested to my colleagues, one of the reasons that students don’t value their education as much as sometimes we think they should, or value our course as much as they think they should, is because when they get to the end, they may think “I always knew that, that was obvious, I knew those things.” And so we can help students realize that there’s a start point. And then there are many points along the road to learning, and that they may have learned more than they thought they did in a given course or given program. And I think that’s important for us in terms of demonstrating the value of education. And I think it’s important for students in terms of understanding and developing some humility about how it is that we learn and how hard it is and how long it takes to learn anything that’s really valuable.

Rebecca: I think, in my experience, students really appreciate the opportunity to slow down and reflect on their learning, because they’re often not given that opportunity. And when you’re doing that throughout an entire semester, they really do get excited about how much they’re learning and they get energized by that and seeing that they can achieve things over and over and over again.

Tom: I agree, and what we found with most of the studies of classroom assessment techniques, the simple ones is: first, classroom assessment techniques can’t really be separated from everything else that’s going on in teaching, they’re just one little part of the whole teaching and learning spectrum. They, at best, seem to make about a 5- 8% difference in how much students learn, which is about half a grade. And I think that’s important, but I don’t want to overstate it. So they’re not a panacea and they’re not a silver bullet, but they’re something that can lift up, to some degree, students’ performance and their learning. And the last thing I’ll say is nothing works for everybody. And so there is no technique or no series of techniques that every single teacher or every single student that I’ve worked with found valuable. And so one of the points of having 55 techniques is to hope that there’s one or two or five in there that people will actually find that work for them.

Rebecca: So you just reminded us about there’s 55 techniques, how do you imagine an instructor using your book? Is it a read from the beginning to the end? Do you have it organized in ways that instructors can easily dip in and out?

Tom: I can’t imagine reading it from the beginning to the end, and I don’t think anyone ever has. That would surprise me, except maybe the proofreaders [LAUGHTER] and they weren’t worrying about what it meant. So it’s organized so that there are many ways, there are actually eight ways to find a technique that might be useful for a given situation or a given teacher. One of those ways is the simplest and that’s alphabetical. So if someone has mentioned a technique to you, you can easily find it that way. The others are a bit more complicated, but I think the most valuable for many people is an index of all the techniques that have been used by discipline and documented by discipline, and the examples by discipline in the book. And there are a couple of 100 examples in the book of how people use these in different disciplines, kind of from A to Z, from anthropology to zoology, and everything in between. So those are ways that many people use. There are also a couple of inventories in the book. One is something called the teaching goals inventory, which was in the first and second edition, and has been used in lots of ways by many people and written about and research has been done on the teaching goals inventory, and it is exactly what it sounds like, an inventory of what we think we’re trying to teach. For this book, I created what I think is kind of a more contemporary take on that, and that’s something that I call the course learning outcomes inventory, or CLOI, and it’s really flipping that and saying, okay, it’s important what we want to teach, but let’s look at it from the point of view of what do we want students to learn? And so the CLOI, the course learning outcomes inventory, the statements are statements of learning outcomes. There are 57, they’re divided up into kinds of learning outcomes, and people can use it as a self assessment. Those items both in the teaching goals inventory and the CLOI are all linked to classroom assessment techniques in an index. So if you pick number 47 goal or number 47 outcome, you can find techniques that are linked to that. Lastly, we’ve done indexing by Bloom’s Taxonomy, and by Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning outcomes, and also by the big solo taxonomy, which is one that’s much used in the Commonwealth world, in the British and Canadian and Australian and New Zealand systems. So there are eight ways to skin a CAT in this book, or to find a cat at least. And I hope those will be useful to folks. And I think different kinds of indexing work for different kinds of people.

John: You mentioned that when this book first came out these things were done on paper. But one of the things that’s grown quite a bit over the years, as you’ve mentioned, is online instruction. Could you tell us a little bit about how some of the techniques can be used in an asynchronous environment?

Tom: Well, I think there are huge advantages to the technology that we have now compared to having to do all this on paper, having to read all those papers after class, or all those index cards, in my case, after class and then waited until the next class, when I saw students again, the time lag was a real problem. So being able to respond almost immediately, or in relatively short time to students in asynchronous courses, to their questions, and to their confusions, and to also let them know that they’re learning some things really well… they really got that… and that they’ve come up with some ideas that I never would have thought of that are excellent. To do those things in real time, I think, is much more effective in terms of teaching and learning than waiting two or three days or a week. Also, as you mentioned, we have technologies for polling students and for analyzing their responses that are ever more sophisticated and powerful. And so those save teachers a lot of time and work. I was always going through things counting and deciding on the number of times people had mentioned things on paper. This can all be done and is all done for you if you want to do it. And that, again, allows teachers to focus on what really matters. And that is: what’s the meaning of this data? What are students telling me? …and to make decisions about when they’re going to respond and what they’re going to respond to, because you can’t respond to everything in data if you have more than two students. And most of us did, and do. So I think that asynchronous learning has huge advantages, it has some downsides, but it has huge advantages. And one of those probably is that it makes it more difficult to assume that by looking at students, you can tell that they’re learning or not, which I’ve always found an odd idea, but many of my colleagues at least used to seem to think that if students were nodding and looking at them, that they were just tracking with them and understood everything that they were saying. And I used to say to my colleagues, “I’ve known many smilers and nodders that probably were thinking of something else entirely, and classroom assessment proved that to me.

John: I’ve seen that so much. We’ve heard so many faculty during workshops over the years who say, “Well, I can tell whether they’re learning just by looking at the expressions on their faces.” And I’ve never found that. There are a lot of students who will be nodding and smiling. And then when you ask them a question, or they ask you a question, it’s really clear that they don’t have the basic idea. At an economics conference, I was presenting a paper and there was someone sitting in the first row taking furious notes while I was talking. So I went up to the person after and asked them what they were taking notes about, because I was curious. And they were actually preparing for a session later in the day. But they looked really engaged throughout the whole thing.

Tom: They were engaged, just not with your lecture. [LAUGHTER]

John: Yes.

Tom: So I think the converse is also true. And that is their students, and people, who don’t appear to be paying any attention at all, or who are frowning or who have had their head down, who are actually paying total attention and learning a lot. And that’s one of the things I learned as well, early in my career, was not to make assumptions based on those sort of superficial impressions. And it’s hard not to, but when you actually learn that some students who appear not to be engaged are engaged in their quiet way. And that’s a humbling lesson, or it was for me.

Rebecca: One of the things that I really like about your book, and also the way the collection of the CATS all in one place is the flexibility, the flexibility of navigate the book, the flexibility of options for the instructor, but also the flexibility of options for learners as well, in different contexts. So I just wanted to highlight that flexibility piece that we haven’t really talked about quite yet.

Tom: Well, that’s the hope. And if this is created as an ebook, and I expect it will be, then I think that will offer people even more flexibility and more sort of usability. It will be a more user friendly book. And again, there are huge advantages to the kinds of technologies that we have available now that we didn’t then. So I think the real key to this is one of the axioms in the book. And that is it’s really about adapting, not adopting. So there are many, many tools in there that people have adapted in a variety of ways, renamed, and that’s all fine. And that’s all exactly what should happen. You should find them, adapt them to their uses, and if they don’t like the names of the CATs, they can change the name.

John: Would this be a good subject for a faculty reading group where people from different disciplines could get together and talk about how either they’ve applied these things or how they might apply them in their classes?

Tom: Well, it has been from the beginning. And we began this whole process working with groups of teachers, initially in community colleges and state colleges, who were interested in assessing student learning. And, of course, the point being trying to improve student learning. And what we did basically was use the teaching goals inventory at that time, you could use the course learning outcomes inventory, with those teachers to get them to focus on what they really wanted to know. And in the book, I’ve written about, in one of the chapters, four different ways you can approach using classroom assessment techniques and figuring out which one to use. But everybody had ideas and theories and questions or problems that they wanted to try to solve. And so we started with that. And then we said, if that’s your question or problem or theory or outcome or goal, what might be a good tool to try to help you gather a reasonable amount, a manageable amount, of data from students that might help you learn, and might help them learn? And that’s really where we began, and those discussions and the collegiality that came from them, and the interactions that came from that, were always the most valuable part of that professional development. That when we ask people: “What did you take away from this?” The first thing that they said was not a bunch of techniques. The first thing that they said was the interactions with my colleagues, the relationships with my colleagues, learning from my colleagues, and then they talked about the actual content that they had learned and the things that they had done. So I think those interactions and those relationships that people can make, by having a group focused around this. This is an excuse to get together and talk about teaching and learning. I think from our experience, we found any excuse to get folks together to talk about teaching and learning, especially if it’s across disciplines, is always fruitful.

Tom: …particularly if there’s food. [LAUGHTER]

John: Yes. The third edition list you as author with Todd Zakrajsek, could you tell us how this collaboration came about and how it worked?

Tom: I think this was, in part, an insurance policy for the publishers. Given my advanced age, they wanted to make sure that they had someone involved in the project, who could take over if I just kicked the bucket. So, in the last six months of the book project, after I had finished writing the manuscript, Todd Zakrajsek joined with me and was really invaluable in finishing the process, in coming up with great ideas and suggesting great ideas, especially for the use of technology and AI with CATs, and in helping me manage the process with the publisher, which is much more complicated than it was 30 years ago. He also wrote the discussion questions for use by teachers and faculty developers, and I think those are going to be very helpful to folks.

John: We’re recording this in May, and the book is scheduled for release in June. We always end by asking, what’s next?

Tom: Well, I’ll answer that. But I’ll first say to teachers, what I always say, and that is, “Feel free to ask your librarian to order the book, so that you can use it, and your colleagues can use it.” Don’t tell Wiley and Jossey Bass that I said that, but I think that’s important. So what’s next for me is I’ve been working for a while with a group of people in, strangely enough, pharmacy education. I’m not a pharmacist, and I’m doing research with graduate students on what we call core concepts in developing what are the core concepts in pharmacotherapy? And that’s been very interesting for me. I’ve learned a lot from that. And so I’m ongoing with that. And we’re beginning to work on educational materials related to that. So that’s one of the things that I’m doing. And I’ve actually, I don’t want to commit to this too much, but I’m thinking about writing a book based on an article that I wrote that people have found useful, called “A Teacher’s Dozen.” And so I’ve updated that. I’ve been working on that actually for a few years, and something may come of that.

Rebecca: Well, we’ll be excited to find out what that is soon, maybe. But you haven’t committed, but maybe. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you. It’s been great talking to you. And my copy of the book is on preorder. And I am looking forward to receiving that.

Tom: So am I. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us. It was great to hear about the origin story of the book and how it’s evolved over time and I know a whole other generation of teachers will appreciate the new edition as well as teachers who have been practicing for a long time.

Tom: I hope it will be useful. Listen, it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to talk with you both. Thank you for giving me this opportunity

John: We should note that this is the first of two podcast episodes discussing this book. In next week’s podcast we’ll be joined by Todd Zakrajsek, who will be discussing his role in this work.

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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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