Antagonistic relationships with students are not uncommon—there is a history of faculty distrust of students. In this episode Michelle Miller joins us to discuss a same-side approach where faculty and students work together in support of student learning.
Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World and A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Students’ Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to a variety of publications including The Chronicle of Higher Ed and is the co-editor with James Lang of the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed Series at Oklahoma University Press.
Show Notes
- Denial, C. J. (2024). A pedagogy of kindness (Vol. 1). University of Oklahoma Press.
- Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-rich education: How human connections drive success in college. Jhu Press.
- McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (2020). Training learning strategies to promote self-regulation and transfer: The knowledge, belief, commitment, and planning framework. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(6), 1363-1381.
- Gannon, Kevin. How to Create a Syllabus. Chronicle of Higher Education
- Chandar, S., Crum, R., Pennino, E., Ishikawa, C., Ghosh Hajra, S., & McDonald, K. (2023). Ten tips for developing a more inviting syllabus. Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education, 24(3).
- Selected Tea for Teaching podcasts with discussion of the syllabus:
- Christine Harrington. A Motivational Syllabus. Episode 61.
- Kevin Gannon, Radical Hope. Episode 130.
- Ken Bain, Super Courses. Episode 186.
- Miller, Michelle (2024). A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Students’ Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can. University of Oklahoma Press.
- Miller, Michelle (2024). Learning Students’ Names. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode. 365. October 30.
- POD
Transcript
John: Antagonistic relationships with students are not uncommon—there is a history of faculty distrust of students. In this episode we discuss a same-side approach where faculty and students work together in support of student learning.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …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 Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World and A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Students’ Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to a variety of publications including The Chronicle of Higher Ed and is the co-editor with James Lang of the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed Series at Oklahoma University Press. Welcome back. Michelle.
Michelle: Hi, thanks. It’s great to be here. Thanks for the chance to speak with you today.
John: It’s great to talk to you. It’s been too long. Today’s teas are:… Michelle, are you drinking tea?
Michelle: I am not. I had all great intentions, and one thing led to another, and our time was upon us, and so I will be drinking a nice, tall glass of water
Rebecca: Again, the foundation of tea. I have Lady Grey today, John.
John: And I have ginger peach green tea today.
Rebecca: Nice. So we invited you here today to discuss a workshop that you’ve been offering recently on teaching from the same side. What do you mean by teaching from the same side.
Michelle: So I want to just say right off the top here, it’s not like a formal framework or a theory or something like that, it’s really one resonant phrase that kept coming to the top of my mind to bring together a number of themes and ideas and even philosophies that I’m seeing converging out there in the world of higher education, pedagogy and course design. And so when I look at all the roots, I think of things like Pedagogy of Kindness, Cate Denial’s wonderful book and framework. I think about the idea of relentless welcome that was talked about in Peter Felton and Leo Lambert’s book, even some themes that come up from ungrading and alternative grading, all of which are feeding into this idea of: “Are there strategies? Are there practices that are essentially more adversarial than they need to be in our relationships with students and what might we try instead, and what can be some of the outcomes?” So those are some of the things that pulled together and have started again to come to the forefront of my mind as I’ve talked about this with faculty. So, teaching from the same side, itself, just the phrase, it’s also something that I wrote about in a newsletter issue from a couple of years back, and it keeps coming back to my mind, and I think it continues to resonate with readers of that newsletter. I think I got a lot more traction with readers that I have with some other ideas or themes or discussions that I’ve put out there in the past. That’s what got me thinking a little bit more about some fundamental realignments that can take place in our ideas about why students are taking our classes, our ability to meld those goals and find common ground with the goals that we have for them, and to even interrogate and question some practices that we may take for granted, even things like how we frame policies in our syllabus, what those policies even are, and how we think about drawing students into the concepts and material that we want to share with them as excited, engaged teachers ourselves.
John: It makes so much sense that we should share the same goals as our students, that we want our students to learn, and they want to learn. Yet a lot of faculty come into teaching with this adversarial approach. And Cate Denial talked about that in her book at the beginning, how she was encouraged to not trust students so much. And I remember getting a very similar induction into academia from colleagues. Why is an adversarial teaching approach or teaching relationship so common?
Michelle: Well, I really like how you talked about your formative experiences as a college instructor. And I think even for those of us like myself, where it’s: “ah, that was decades ago. How could that still be affecting me today?” But that’s what formative experiences do. They set us on a track, and they put us in a mindset that may be with us for a lot longer than we realize. So I think it’s really productive to think back, and I encourage faculty to do that as well. When I do get to talk to folks about this and work with them, I say, “Well, what were some of your early experiences, both as a student and as a budding, upcoming instructor?” And yes, like so many of us, I was told explicitly and implicitly at every turn, “Well, you got to keep an eye on those students. Your job is to choose the goals and the content and make the demands on the students.” We are the experts in the room. It makes sense that we would be leaders in that way. But then that turns into the sense of and you can absolutely expect that students don’t want that. I’ve heard different variations on: students just want the easy points, they want to check a box, they want to get a credential, go on to have a job and not intellectually engage. And so, hear that over and over and over, and you’re encouraged, and maybe it’s even valorized in certain cultures, certain departments, certain institutions, that the more you can push that onto students, the better instructor you are. And so I think many of us are questioning that, but we may not have some better ideas or anything concrete to replace it with, or we’re concerned what would happen if I changed this policy or took a different approach? And I’ll say that I also had an experience I’m just realizing now I’ve been thinking back to this experience. It was actually the very first time I ever taught a course as the instructor of record, and it was fraught with all kinds of stresses, as you might imagine [LAUGHTER], and there were definitely times when I felt that what I wanted was mismatched with what students wanted, and that we were on different sides, but it was long enough ago that I’m comfortable even sharing the particular conflict that happened. So I had a teaching assistant in this class, and the way it played out, the teaching assistant was about my same age, which was already kind of fraught enough, so I’m trying to navigate this relationship with him, and he is quite naturally trying to step up and be helpful and tell me what to do and what he thought I was frankly doing wrong in the course. And we had had a lot of student feedback coming in over and over that students, they weren’t happy with the course, but there was one thing in particular that they kind of wanted, and I looked, it was like, “Well, that’s an easy fix.” It just had to do with how many points and how fine grained of feedback they were getting on this one recurring assignment. I was like, “Well, we could do that if we change this midstream and it works better for everybody. Why not?” And my teaching assistant and I had a confrontation in my office. I mean, I remember it quite well. It w as the sort of where you’re both standing up on other sides of the desk and raising your voices at each other. And he said, flat out: “If you do this, regardless of what the change is, if you let those students know that they can ask you for something and that you’ll give in…” his words… “then you’ve lost it. The students are going to be in charge from here on out, and that’s going to be it for this semester. That is what will happen if you do this.” And I don’t see a good reason not to do it, and I’m going to try it, and we tried it. And what do you know? Students were happier and satisfied. We quit getting those same emails every single week, and it was fine. If anything, the level of respect and willingness to put forth productive effort improved. It didn’t go away. So I had the benefit of having that, but it’s something that I still had to tuck away and return to all these many years later and occasionally still do to remind myself that sometimes it’s a matter of just trying it. So even if we’re kind of dissatisfied with an older, adversarial philosophy, there are ways to experiment and find better approaches that meet our needs and our goals and our aspirations as the experts in the room, but also meet students’ needs a lot better.
Rebecca: We see a lot of examples where this us versus them relationship comes up. We see it on campuses, between faculty and administration, between students and faculty in a lot of different contexts. What’s the value of trying something different and not having this us versus them mindset.
Michelle: Well, the other really indelible experience and tipping point that I had around this does it have to be us versus them thought process was during remote emergency instruction. So during the pandemic itself, where that case, I think, like for so many of us, it wasn’t even a matter of like, well, maybe I could take something good and make it even better, that we could accrue benefits. I think we were in survival mode. I know I was. I had a handle on the technology. I think I was probably pretty well positioned, but I still had this experience, as many of us did in spring of 2020, going, “Oh, everything that I planned out and I was going to do and all the boxes I was going to check, because that’s what I always do, we can’t do that anymore.” And I just felt the ground fall out from underneath of me. I’m kind of going, Well, how do I choose? [LAUGHTER] And if we can only do some of these things and not a lot of the others, how can I make the right decisions, and part of it is realizing…[LAUGHTER] giving yourself a little bit of grace, and saying, “Well, you do the best you can, and not all the decisions are going to be right.” But I kept returning to that guiding beacon of, “why did students take this class in the first place?” None of us anticipated how it was going to play out when we all signed on for this. But what were the most important takeaways that they needed and wanted to get? And I just was like, “look, whatever the activity or learning objective was, if it aligns better with that, what brought them to the course in the first place? That’s what we’ll do, and other things are going to take the back burner or go away.” So I think that was one real benefit of when we know we need to revise something and not everything can happen, it can be a prioritization tool. But, what I sense is drawing in some of my fellow faculty to this is the idea of that better and more welcoming atmosphere and the possibility of taking more of our contact and conversations with students out of the realm of like the negotiation over points. “If you do this, I will give you that.” I don’t think any of us are really in teaching and getting inspired by conversations like that. sometimes they have to happen, but to have fewer of those and more of “I am struggling with the material. I’m worried about how this is turning out. I don’t know what to do next,” and me being able to step in and say, “Ah, I can help you,” because we are fundamentally on the same side. And even up to yesterday, when a student was asking me something kind of involved about a test grade, and could we do this? I had to take a breath, step back and say, “Okay, what moves her closer to the common goal of her learning about and getting excited about psychology, which is what we’re doing in intro to psych, and what would move her further away from that?” And yeah, more of a same-side solution, without getting too far into the weeds of what it was, I think we hit on something, and I saw a little bit of a light come up for her as well. Now, I think non-adversarial teaching approaches of different kinds are starting to make it into scholarship and teaching and learning and other sorts of literature. But here too, I want to be upfront and say, Hey, I don’t think that we can point to 20 research studies and five meta-analyses showing, well, if you tweak this one thing about your mindset or philosophy, that students are going to attain X, Y and Z. I hope it happens. But right now, I’m in that, to me, exciting and sometimes intimidating state of like, I think there’s something to this, but we just have to keep working working with it.
Rebecca: Minimally, maybe you’ll just be happier. [LAUGHTER]
Michelle: …minimally happier as an instructor. Yes, that’s not about just saying anything goes or let’s always be buddy buddy, and I never want to have that conversation about your grades. It’s not that so much. I think it’s a matter of balance and realizing how even subtly telegraphing or communicating to students like, yeah, no, I said it was all about the learning, I mean that and the points, all that will shake out [LAUGHTER] in the end, and I’m actually willing to act accordingly and keep on that talking point. That really does start to make them step back and say, like, “Oh, actually, this is different, and I think I like it.”
John: Earlier you mentioned that so many of the discussions among faculty are with perceptions of declining student engagement, less student motivation, and students seeing education primarily as a means to a degree and checking off that box so they can move on to the next stage. And there are some surveys that indicate that students today see less connection between what they’re learning and their future lives and careers. Might the same-side approach help support an environment where it’s easier, perhaps, to motivate students,
Michelle: Right, so student motivation. And here too, it’s sometimes, even to this day, still like a little uncomfortable to me as a cognitive psychologist and one who comes from that tradition and sort of side of our psychology. But, as I frequently share about Minds Online. I realized just in the course of writing that first book, which is very cognitively oriented, we talk about memory, we talk about transfer of thinking skills and all this stuff. But I was like, “Oh, wait, if we don’t also talk about why students are doing all this great evidence-based [LAUGHTER] coursework in the first place, then why are we here?” So yeah, just acknowledging that, and reminding myself pretty much every day as an instructor that yes, I do have to think about this. So there is that perception. And I’m not, first of all going to necessarily just totally turn away from somebody else’s authentic experience and say, “This is what my students are telling me, but I respectfully also submit that when I really started reflecting on it, my experience, even recently with students, has not fit that mold of like, “Well, Professor, can’t you just not take up my time, give me my points and let me go on my merry way to a job.” I have students expressing a very diverse range of goals. Some have not formulated goals. They’re not trying to tick a box to get a job. They don’t know what the job is yet. They’re not even sure what credential they want to get. So I think in the right environment, if you know what to look for, and you’re primed to look for it, that you will see that students they do want to learn. Now do they always act in accordance with high intellectual ideals that we start the semester with? No, and I would submit that none of us do. It’s just not how human beings work. But there is a core and a well of authentic intrinsic engagement. But actions need to follow those ideals. So we talk about motivation. I do keep coming back to and frequently sharing with my fellow faculty two old good solid aspects of motivation theory that just seem to work time and again. And one of them is actually getting a lot of new air time as well, and sort of a revival of interest. So I can share those with you, and I’ll hit the real high spots of these. First of all, self-determination theory, our old friend… and all of the motivation theories, by the way too… they also really bring home an important point, which is not to think about motivation in terms of “you’re a motivated person,” or “you aren’t.” Motivation theory just really looks at the conditions of the environment and the setting, which is great news for us teachers, because students don’t have to walk in, just motivated people. They can respond to the cues and the incentives we give them. So self-determination theory is we’re more motivated when we have autonomy and choice in what we do, we have some sense of mastery, or that we’re getting better at what we’re learning, and there’s relatedness or social components, so somebody else out there cares [LAUGHTER] that I’m getting better at whatever this thing is. And I’ve just seen informally, but it’s a very strong impression that I have over the last few years of like scholarship of teaching and learning and learning and learning sciences research, lots of folks are discovering or rediscovering these principles and say, “Well, what happens if we actually bake these into, say, an online class? What happens to student achievement, especially around the autonomy and choice part?” And that’s one that too, that used to be really tough to do. I tried building all kinds of choices and saying, “Well, maybe students can be graded more on tests or weight their assignments more heavily.” I tried that many years ago, and it was so hard to do and track, and now, with better technology tools, we can say, “Why didn’t you pick this? This is your strength and you want to pursue it. Do that, or here’s a fork in the road, pick A or B.” So those things can really elicit just some basic, more motivated behavior. So there’s that, and then there’s always intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Lots of us say, like, you don’t have to just rely on intrinsic motivation and hope that it will be there. There’s ways to kind of promote that, and it doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of all grade or other kinds of incentives. So I’ve been playing around with different ways to spark that intrinsic motivation, some sneaky ones that psychologists know about, and also some ones that I think lots of us hit on through our teaching experience, things like introducing surprise or asking students to predict, rather than always just telling them what the outcome is, so that can help build that over time.
Rebecca: Were there some sneaky ones you were going to share?
Michelle: Well, see how I did that. [LAUGHTER]
John: Is there a secret handshake or something needed for these?
Michelle: Oh, it is. It is, it walks a fine line between psychology and perhaps a little bit of manipulation, but people can decide if this is in their comfort zone or not. It has a terrible name, which is the “hypocrisy effect,” but has wonderful outcomes. So essentially, it’s a way to try to induce attitude change by getting people to act in accordance to what we’ve said or done before. So we all kind of naturally like to be consistent. If we say it, we tend to start to believe it over time. So there’s ways of doing this, essentially getting students to endorse or identify for themselves the value of either course features or things they’re learning about. Like I have a colleague here at NAU who, years back, was teaching a first-year seminar and it’s a pop culture topic. I won’t get too deep into what it was, but you might look at that and say, “Oh, sure, it’s inherently interesting.” Then again, students may look at it and say, “Well, maybe I should spend more time actually studying in this required chemistry class” or something. And maybe their families are even saying, like, “Why are you taking that?” So, right from the beginning, what he did is he asked students to write a letter home. I don’t know whether they sent it or not, but this is a classic technique to tap into this. So that was the assignment: write to your family and tell them why you’re taking a class in this thing that, on the face of it, might seem a little frivolous, and talk about the skills you’re going to acquire and how that’s going to help you in everything you’re going to do to make the most of your college education from here on out. So, that could be a way to spark authentic buy-in to: “Yeah, this is why I am actually going to put effort into this class,” or in my case, I hit on this with an assignment that does double duty, trying to get more investment in using class time and staking more of the grade on that without doing very traditional participation grading. So they do a reflection on what they’ve been learning over the last two weeks. And one of the prompts that’s in there does ask them like, “What’s your favorite learning?” and yeah, I’m leaning on them pretty heavily.[LAUGHTER] It’s a little heavy handed to say, “Tell me what you like.” But what does that do? You come up with something. I mean, students do have the option. If they’re like, “this is not doing it for me,” [LAUGHTER] I won’t take that personally, but most do find something. And it’s a good fit for intro to psych, because you do something totally different every week. There’s something for everybody [LAUGHTER] in this course. And so they’re the ones saying, “Well, here’s why learning about Pavlovian conditioning can really help you in your life. Here’s something I didn’t know about our sensory systems that was really insightful.” So instead of me always telling them, they’re telling me, and it should spark more engagement over time.
Rebecca: Good. I want you to get off the hook without the sneaky… [LAUGHTER]
Michelle: Yes, knowing me as you do.
John: In our past discussions and much of your work, you usually focus on the cognitive side of learning, as you’ve mentioned, things like attention, memory, critical thinking. How might teaching from the same side support all of that?
Michelle: Well, I think that that’s just such an exciting perspective on this as well, and that’s something that I’ve really been challenging myself on lately too. Say, are these two separate things? So building in things like more retrieval practice, that active, effortful recall that we know is so much better than just the standard playbook of like, okay, you make a PowerPoint deck and explain it to me, and then I’ll take it home and reread it, which we know does not work really well from the knowledge perspective. Distributed spaced studying is sometimes harder to do as schedules get busy, and transfer and practice, this is hard stuff to actually get in there and keep practicing the skills, including with really messy, challenging problems. All that stuff is evidence-based. You know it works. I know it works. Our students, on the other hand, just they see the effort, or even some other facets of this that dissuade them from it. So the way I’ve been thinking of it lately is like, okay, so we finally have these evidence-based practices going mainstream. Like, really over the last 10 years, it’s this incredible success story with more people, podcast listeners, there’s all this great interest. So that’s wonderful, but maybe the next level is to put more into getting students to internalize those on their own. Because, after all, I mean, these are techniques that even if they’re not built into a class, if I know about them, I can probably bring them in as a student, or even if I’m not in a formal class, I’m in professional learning situation years after I’ve graduated, what better skill to have available to me than knowing how to break something down and say, “Oh yeah, I’m going to use some of these same principles.” And there’s some suggestions from the research literature that when students do have those good experiences and see it in action, that they actually do internalize it, even without anybody standing over them and saying, let’s do this. So I’m challenging myself to say, “Well, can I change my mindset from evidence-based practices, cognitive learning principles…?” These are not things just to do two students, say, “All right, I’ve applied this to you because I know it will help,” but also to say, “Hey, this is why it is the way it is, and isn’t it exciting? Let me bring you in.” And that might seem simple, and some of it does come down to transparency, this concept that many of your listeners may be familiar with, where we just quickly say, “Okay, here’s the assignment, but also here’s why it’s here, why it’s set up the way it is, and how it’s supposed to help you.” There is some research showing that that’s beneficial. Students will sit back and go, “Oh, okay, now I get it, and I’m more invested, and I’m on your side now as well to say I’m going to do this hard project and do it the way that you suggested.” So yeah. There is that. But I think also what I’ve facing up to myself is it’s not always just like, “Well, let me just explain to you a better way to do it, and then why won’t the students do it?“ And perhaps coming away is like, “Oh, they’re lazy. They don’t want to try something new, or they just aren’t listening to me.” Well, think of it in terms of risk. Students, by the time they’ve gotten to our classrooms, they are, of course, not blank slates, especially when it comes to their study techniques. If you talk to students for any length of time, you know that they’ve developed what they believe oftentimes are successful study approaches. And it’s a risk. So it’s really a risk-benefit calculation that our students may be engaging in to say, “Well, not only are you telling me to do this thing that’s hard, to close my book and quiz myself, but that’s going to take away from or replace something that’s worked before. Just because you’re telling me to do this, you want me to put my grades on the line [LAUGHTER] and throw out the thing that got me to here.” So when you see it in that way, you realize that there’s perhaps some different tactics and approaches. And here, some really esteemed cognitive psychologists have picked this up as really a challenge. So Mark McDaniel and his longtime collaborator, Gil Einstein, they’re known for a ton of different applied research findings and discoveries all over. And they stepped back and said, “Oh, wait a minute. This is an example of a dynamic that has been with us for some time in all branches of applied psychology, which is just knowing doesn’t transform behavior. Maybe folks out there are all eating their eight servings of vegetables and 30 minutes of exercise, doing everything we know we’re supposed to do, we don’t do it.” And there’s lots of reasons why, but Einstein and McDaniel said it’s still my sense is a work in progress, but they’ve put together a pretty detailed step-by-step program. They call it KBCP. So knowledge, belief, commitment, planning, I think, is what it stands for. But basically, you can get the sense here that it’s about not just “do your retrieval practice,” but also, “let me tell you about it, sure, inform you. But I’m not going to stop there. Let’s also do some demonstrations. Let’s try it with and without, and we can all see it in action.” So building that really authentic buy-in, and then encouraging students to get out there and try it in higher stake settings. So okay, what do you plan to do for that big exam you have in that other class? And let’s lay out a plan for that, and then come back and reflect and say, Well, did it work the way that I predicted it would [LAUGHTER] as the expert? And now, what do you want to do? So again, it’s something that I think is emerging, and their program is pretty detailed. So I don’t know that everybody’s going to go through that step by step, but the spirit of it is very much with me as a cognitively oriented instructor and researcher to say, “Okay, but how do you really reach people so that they are willing and excited to take it forward” and realizing that students, under the right circumstances, may do that, and that’s a much greater gift to them than just what you’re doing by designing a single class.
Rebecca: One of the key things of that model seems to be the idea, or from my experience, is that ability to achieve something and achieve that success and see it working, so that you then might be motivated to try it again. Thinking about any parent who has a kid that doesn’t like to practice stuff, but if they have some success in seeing that the practice helps them achieve something that they want to achieve, then they’re more likely to do it again.[LAUGHTER]
Michelle: It’s a competence piece. Now you’re putting it that way. Now I’m kind of seeing that connection. It’s the competence piece of SDT, and, yeah, as inspiration to stick with it and do the hard things. And when we’re on the same side, we have our techniques as parents who are also in the motivation business, but I have to feel like we are in a better position to do that when we can help celebrate and say, remember, we are in the same side. And here’s where it was difficult, but here’s where, yeah, you tried it and it worked, and let’s celebrate that win together from the same side.
Rebecca: You’ve mentioned a wide variety of cognitive practices. Can we think about what that looks like in practice?
Michelle: Yeah, and here’s where we can tap a little bit more into my other love within the field of psycholinguistics, but some of this is just basic communication principles as well. So as a piecing together and pulling from lots of different areas, how do we communicate that we are on the same side and establish that atmosphere of, frankly, trust and a non-adversarial approach to these things. Some of the things that have struck me as just, first of all, a lot of this work, a lot of the folks that I would consider to be my models, and the folks I’m looking up to here, they’ve talked about the syllabus as a starting point. So there’s lots and lots and lots of work out there. Sometimes, like, as the work builds up, it’s hard to synthesize, but a few threads that I’ve been pulling out. So anybody who has not read Kevin Gannon’s classic, I think, “How to Create a Syllabus” guide, it came out in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years back. It was really, I think, one of the first clear, unambiguous, like “we need to do this and not that” in our syllabi, including calling into question, in a good way, a lot of the things that we have taken for granted, and I know I just copy pasted [LAUGHTER] semester after semester, including things like using all caps. It might come from a good intention of like, “this is important, I want you to see it.” But as Gannon so accurately points out, this is how we scream at each other online. And why do that? [LAUGHTER] and it’s just saying is there some other way to highlight what’s important? Or even, I had a faculty member say to me recently, she’s like, “Yeah, for all the complaining about, oh, students don’t read it, students don’t get it. Well, think about the policies we deal with. When do we look at them? …was when we need them.” So yes, absolutely, students should read the thing from top to bottom. This faculty member, she even sends out, pieces out, like relevant parts of it as reminders or announcements at the right times of the semester. So there’s other ways to emphasize besides just the all caps and Gannon also talks about is like, is there some way that your syllabus is kind of getting across that, not only here’s the things I don’t want you to do, but there’s no reasons for it other than I say so and it gets across this idea that “and I expect you to do all these bad things.” So playing around with ways of dialing that down. So syllabus warmth is another major concept, some interesting findings about how sensitive students are to that. And then lastly, I ran across, just in the last two years, a great article came out, maybe we put in the show notes. It was focused on STEM syllabi. And here they just took a very open approach, and they surveyed a variety of syllabi to say which of these seems more supportive and inviting and warm to students? And they have a great list that they laid out, including things like just phrasing things as we: we will, we are going to engage in these difficult topics, and here’s how we are going to do it, instead of students must… [LAUGHTER] which is what used to be in all of my syllabi, talking about challenge in positive ways. And here’s the resources that we want. And again, sometimes, yeah, it’s a good thing to have, like, “well, here’s the tutoring center.” But to say, “hey, successful students go to the tutoring center, and I promise you, [LAUGHTER] they will be supportive,” …some other way to do that and encouraging, very explicitly, that we do want students to come talk to us. So yeah, it’s like, well, I said what my office hours were, and now I’m sitting here, and why won’t students come talk to me? [LAUGHTER] And now I have several other alternative ways to schedule appointments, and I do give a little rah rah, but I also back up that verbiage with “and here’s even more access to me and all the ways to do it and in the circumstances under which you should do it.” So that’s one big starting point, is the syllabus. We can definitely get into a few others. But if you start there, I think a lot of other things will fall into line.
John: And we should mention we have a few past podcasts that address some of that. We’ll include some of the links in the show notes related to effective practices in creating that same side environment in the class using the syllabus.
Rebecca: One of the things that I think I’m hearing you say is that to be on the same side doesn’t mean we don’t hold boundaries, it’s just how we communicate those boundaries.
Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. And to pick up on that, run with that a little bit, that is now a really important part of my practice as well. While I’m going through the syllabus and cleaning it up and fixing it up, as far as tone, I’m also questioning the policies, so things like I’ve written about being pretty critical, and I don’t do anymore, the 10% per day deduction for deadlines. I handle deadlines very differently now, which is not to say I don’t have any or it’s anything goes, but I think it’s more the process of questioning it, of saying, “Well, which deadlines in this course are actually fixed, and have I explained that to students or mentioned it in any way to differentiate those where there is a firm deadline, like you really do have to get your discussion post in by Sunday night,” because, Haven’t we all been in an online discussion and somebody answers you three weeks later and we don’t actually have a conversation? Didn’t take forever, but that’s just a little bit of saying, “Yeah, it’s not just because I say so.” So yes, as we get into the substance of it, that is where we do have to think pretty deeply about what appropriate boundaries are. And just for the record, too, it doesn’t mean being buddy buddy, and we’re all friends with students at all times. I’m pretty formal in my interactions with students. That’s appropriate for my style and my persona. But I would challenge listeners, go back over a syllabus, as you’re planning for next semester, identify at least one thing to say, “Is there some way that this could be less harsh?” Perhaps even, as I mentioned, I have my little heuristics for saying, “Well, do I say yes or no?” Does it take the student closer to the learning goal or away from the learning goal? If it’s an assignment that’s intended to develop their skills, so it’s a formative assignment somewhere in the middle of the semester and it’s late, I mean, if the goal of that is to engage them in the learning and that’s why I worked so hard building in the first place. Well, if they’re five minutes past the deadline, don’t I still want them to do it, maybe I still want them to do it a week after the deadline. So with that learning and the shared goals and those shared ideals as the reorientation point, that’s what we can go through and do. So yes, it doesn’t mean throwing out grades, necessarily, unless you want to bring in ungrading for other reasons. It doesn’t mean that now we’re all completely informal, and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t any hard and fast boundaries in the course. But I’ve thought those through and not simply just transferred them over, because that’s what we always do, and if we don’t, students will take advantage of us.
John: One other thing that we’ve talked to you about in the past is the importance of learning students’ names. Could you just talk about that a little bit, and we’ll include a link to your book as well as the earlier podcast on the topic.
Michelle: Yeah. So I mean, I guess if we trace the whole evolution of how to get on the same side or begin that in our instruction. It starts with me thinking about my past and what do I believe is true about students, and then looking in at the overall policies and the objectives of the course, then getting into the communications, and then I’m in the classroom with them, and if it is a face-to-face class, one of the very best, often surprising to students, and effective ways to make a personalized classroom atmosphere is to know and use students’ names. And so that’s also something folks who’ve followed my writing or things I speak about know, that’s something that I’ve really been on a mission to do in my own practice, and to help others know how to do it as well. Now, that said, it’s very, very difficult. That’s one of the themes of the book. If folks see it right off the top, it’s like, and if you’re one of the many people who sidle up to me in various settings and go, “Oh my gosh, I have to tell you something. I’m not good at learning names,” like, okay, most of us are pretty bad at it. It takes effort, and that can be an effort that we model. I mean, even as I circulate around in my classroom, if it’s a big class, we’ve got little table tents with names, which is a great starting point, but I want to eventually know the names, [LAUGHTER] so I go around to the little groups during small group discussions, “Okay, turn your table tent over. I’m going to practice.” And they see me making mistakes. They see me putting effort into it, and see me struggling a little bit, which maybe also establishes a little bit of common ground there as well. But if we put in that effort, I guarantee you that not every student, not every time, but over time, you will see a definite trend towards students saying, “You know what? I think I will listen to what she’s saying about the value of this course. I will follow her advice when she says, ‘study it this way, not that way,’ even though my way is harder, I’m going to stick with it when times are tough. And yeah, I’ll do what she says and try to focus on the ultimate goal of learning and attaining what this class is all about, and not just about taking off points and making sure that I can just put in less effort.” So I think that that is definitely of a piece with the rest. And I hope that folks, whether it’s through the advice in my book, or a lot of other good advice out there, or their own techniques, will keep working to get a little bit better every single semester.
Rebecca: I think we have lots of opportunities now to think about how to work more from the same side, but we always end by asking: “What’s next?”
Michelle: What’s next? Well, I’m going to keep working with this idea and seeing how I can bring it into the classroom and keep an eye out for the great research that’s out there, and continue to share that in the newsletter that I put out to faculty and instructional designers and others who care about learning. I will be speaking about this or offering me an opportunity to be part of a workshop… upcoming POD conference. So for those for whom POD is part of their professional life, they might want to check that out. And I will be going into a new role that I’m excited to take on at my institution. It’s a co-directorship position where we’re going to be looking at AI in the curriculum and bringing some of the developments and robust debate in that side of instruction right now, it’s part of, I think, all of our lives, bringing that into my professional life at NAU as well.
John: Well, that’s an area where there’s so many interesting challenges and such a rapid pace of change. That should be an exciting thing to be working on.
Michelle: Yep, all the more reason to get on the same side, don’t you think?
Rebecca: Definitely, and you won’t be bored, that’s for sure. [LAUGHTER] Lots of motivation to get involved in that work.
John: And I wish I could make it to the POD thing, but I’m going to be at the OLC Conference, which, unfortunately, is at the same time this year.
Michelle: That’s how it shakes out some years. We make our choices the best we can.
Rebecca: Well, thanks again for joining us, and hopefully we’ll get to talk to you again soon. Thank you.
John: Thank you, Michelle. Again, it’s always great talking to you, and I also hope we get to talk very soon.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
John: Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.
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