New faculty often begin their teaching careers by emulating the teaching methods that they have observed, but these practices are often not consistent with evidence on how students learn. In this episode, Chris Hakala joins us to discuss the role that educational developers can play in shifting faculty focus from presenting to teaching.
Show Notes
- Alvarez, L. D. C., & Hakala, C. M. (2024). Understanding Educational Developers: Tales from the Center. Taylor & Francis.
- Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251-19257. (a study suggesting that students believe they earn more from lecture)
- For those who missed Gopher, this wikipedia article explains it. The Mosaic browser was the initial source of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Transcript
John: New faculty often begin their teaching careers by emulating the teaching methods that they have observed, but these practices are often not consistent with evidence on how students learn. In this episode, we discuss the role that educational developers can play in shifting faculty focus from presenting to 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 guest today is Chris Hakala. Chris is a professor of psychology and is the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Springfield College. He is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles on the science of learning, assessing learning, large-class instruction, and on teaching centers. His most recent work, co-authored with Leslie D. Cramblet Alvarez is Understanding Educational Developers: Tales from the Center, released in late December 2024. Welcome Chris.
Chris: Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here and have this conversation with the two of you. So I appreciate it.
Rebecca: Today’s teas are: … Chris, are you drinking tea?
Chris: So this is an interesting thing. I’m routinely a coffee drinker. However, my wife and I every morning get up in the morning and we share time together. We actually have a station in our bedroom where we make coffee and tea. And so in honor of my wife and the tea, I’m drinking her tea, which is a Zen green tea, which I will sometimes drink as well. So yes, I’m having Zen green tea this afternoon.
Rebecca: Excellent. Thanks for ditching the coffee for us.
Chris: Happy to do so, happy to do so. I’ve had enough of it already today.
John: And I am drinking a spring cherry green tea, even though it’s late summer here in Oswego.
Rebecca: It does feel more like a spring day today, though, after being so hot for so many days. I have a weird mix of random black teas because I was cleaning out my tea cupboard, [LAUGHTER] so it’s an eclectic mix.
Chris: Whatever gets you through the day, right?
John: I imagine no cherry teas, though.
Rebecca: No, they are black teas without any weird flavors, John.
John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the relationship between pedagogical practice and what research tells us about how students learn. First, though, could you tell us a little bit about your path to becoming an educational developer.
Chris: Sure, it’s an interesting path that actually we talk about a little bit in the book, but one of the things that is fascinating to me about this field of educational development is it’s not a field people often go directly into out of college. And so I went to college in Vermont, at a small school in Vermont, went to grad school, and in grad school, I earned a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of New Hampshire. And I know we’re going to talk about this a little bit more later, but I just want to point out that during that time, we had a course in a seminar in practicum and teaching of psychology, and that course was taught by a faculty member named Victor Banassi, who was doing teaching center work at that time. So it was the first time I began to hear about educational development. It was back in the mid 90s, and so I thought it was kind of interesting, but I went on, I became a faculty member, I received tenure, and then as I was working through my career, I began to notice that many schools had teaching centers. Many schools had the opportunity for faculty to talk to other faculty about what they’re doing and to share ideas. And so I approached our Provost and asked him if we could start a teaching center. And he said, “No, there’s not enough money.” And so I approached him again, and he said, “No, we don’t have enough money.” And finally, I was able to steal an idea from Todd Zakrajsek, who is a name you are probably aware, and Todd recommended me just buying coffee mugs that said Center on it. So I did. I bought coffee mugs that said Center for Teaching and Learning, and I had them branded, and then I handed them out and gave one to the President, and the President said, “Do we have a teaching center?” And the Provost said, “Well, I guess so.” And so they gave me a little bit of money, and so I had this very small teaching center. I would do a little bit for faculty orientation, I’d run some workshops, and it became really interesting for me to see how sharing ideas with faculty about teaching and hearing what they’re saying and what they’re doing and what they’re experiencing with their students was a really wonderful way to engage with my colleagues, to go across disciplines and to really sort of work to improve our students’ learning. So I left there and became a full-time center director in 2014, and I’ve have been doing that ever since. It’s been an interesting process, because as we were speaking off-mic, in 2020 our world changed dramatically, and teaching centers became very important. And it was a really interesting time to see all that work ramp up. And I think now we’re in a different sort of era of teaching centers, as people began to realize the value of educational development when they needed us. Yeah, so it’s been an interesting journey.
Rebecca: I see some sales of teaching center mugs going up [LAUGHTER] with the sneaky strategies for starting teaching centers, moving forward. [LAUGHTER]
Chris: That’s all Todd. It’s all Todd.
Rebecca: He’s always good for a good idea.
Chris: He is good for a good idea.
Rebecca: Most faculty begin their teaching careers without the kind of training that you mentioned that you had as part of your graduate program in evidence-based teaching practices and kind of rely on what they experienced with their own instructors. What are some of the disconnects between learning science and pedagogical practices?
Chris: So it’s a great question. It was really interesting. I’m gonna go back to go back to my experience and sort of talk through that, because I think it’s a great question. I went into my first experience teaching in 1992… by the way, I still have a video of it. I had spectacular hair. It was wavy and flowy… and I went in with this idea that I was now the disseminator of knowledge. I was going to share what I knew with these students, and I did what I had experienced the faculty that I admired do. I lectured. I had an overhead projector, I wrote on the board, and my students were doing the tasks I was asking them to do. They were studying. They were doing well on quizzes and all of that. But what became really apparent to me over time was student learning is not as simple as they just remember things, because there’s more value in students taking what we teach them and expanding that out to other concepts. And so I began to think about it in lots of different ways, and my teaching now looks very different. One of the things that becomes problematic, though, is, as you brought up, Rebecca, many faculty end up in a teaching experience without having any kind of guidance or support. They have very little in the way of reflective teaching, and they think their job is to just share what they know with their students. I hear “covering content” so much from faculty with this idea that they have to make sure they say everything. And I think that helping faculty understand that the magic words coming out of your mouth doesn’t mean a student learns it is a really important thing. And one of the distinctions I draw up with my faculty all the time is this distinction between presenting and teaching. And so I think a lot of faculty are good at presenting, but they haven’t really thought through teaching. And so a lot of times I spend time working with our faculty to talk to them about who they are and what they bring to the table as an instructor, who their students are and how they can begin to find what is going to leverage what we know about student learning in the classroom in the context of who they are and who their students are. So for example, I tend to be pretty expressive in class. I tend to move around a lot. I tend to do lots of interactive things, but that’s also part of who I am. You don’t have to be that to be successful. You can be lots of ways in the classroom, but it’s a matter of understanding that the processes I’m engaged in are to help students focus attention, to help engage them, to draw them in with different anecdotes and stories, to try to tie those things together, and then have them reflect it back to me so we can work through that. People have different approaches, but you have to sort of to be aware of that and know that the student learning is essential. The key to student learning is that they do the work. It’s not that you’re doing all of the work. They’re doing the work. And so you have to help faculty sort of navigate that. And it is fortunate for me. I’m at a small college where teaching is really emphasized and faculty care about it, that I get to work with wonderful people and help them understand some of the things that we know about human learning, and help them sort of integrate that into their classes.
John: And we have lots of faculty who are very interested in improving their teaching, and we also are a teaching focused institution, but there are some faculty who are a little reluctant to change their practices, or consider changing their practices. What are some strategies that you’ve used to help reach out to those faculty who may not see the benefits of changing the way in which they’re teaching.
Chris: Yeah, the recalcitrant faculty problem. It’s a big one. I have had a mixed success. When I arrived on campus, I was fortunate to have someone here who handed me a list of people. On one side was “these people will come to everything you offer. Don’t worry about it. You could roll out a boring thing, they’ll show up.” “These people would come if it’s interesting.” “These people will never darken your door.” And so I went right after the people who would never darken my door and went and had a conversation with them about their teaching. Now, this doesn’t scale up to a big institution because there’s too many people, but in a small institution, it was really effective for me to go talk to faculty, find out what it was they were doing in the classroom, ask them if they were happy with it, and start to look at things in their classes they might want to work on. Now, again, you scale it up to a big institution, you start with departments and ask the department, “what would you like support with?” But one of the things that’s been really helpful for me as a center director is showing faculty things that they can implement, that they can see the impact on, and it’s been simple things. One of the things that our faculty in our health science really like is that I taught them about retrieval practice. They had not really thought about retrieval practice, and so now they’re using tools, including some AI, to build out many little quizzes the students can take on their own that seem to be benefiting the students’ ability to do well on these very high-stakes exams. So it’s a matter of finding the niche where the faculty member’s issue and your expertise can come together. I also strongly, strongly encourage faculty to watch each other teach, which is a really interesting thing. I have an open-door policy. Faculty can show up in my class anytime. It doesn’t matter when, they don’t have to tell me, they can just come. And I have 5 to 10 faculty a semester show up in my class and they just are there, and we talk, and then I go to lots of other faculty members’ classes, and we have an open-door week where we open up classes for faculty to go to each other’s classes. I think that’s really helpful for people to see lots of different ways of doing things. I have a line that my associate director always gets annoyed with when I say, but I believe this. I have faculty who say to me, “Chris, I’ve heard that if you’re funny, students really like it.” And I say “that’s true, but only if you’re really funny. If you’re not funny, it’s terrible.” And I’ve seen faculty try to be funny and they’re not and it fails. So one of the big messages is, “lean into who you are.” It’s okay if you’re a bit of a dork. I love statistics. My students, I get them on board eventually, but I come in with the enthusiasm of someone who loves statistics. So it’s a challenge, and we’re humans. So John, you know, humans don’t always respond well, when you say, “we can help you do something better.” So there’s a lot of nuance to it. I will say teaching centers should never be where bad teachers are sent. I push back against it.
John: We do too.
Rebecca: I think one of the things that’s interesting about teaching centers, and what you said about faculty not having support, is that actually a lot of institutions have teaching centers, so there is the availability of support, but getting said support is not built into requirements or time is not necessarily allocated by the institution to participate in teaching center things. It’s voluntary. It feels extra sometimes. So you talked about your list and individually reaching out to folks. But what are some other strategies to get over this hurdle of helping folks realize that this is a good investment of their time.
Chris: We have some events that are campus wide, and we use these events as a way to try to promote options of how you can interact with the center. So to just give you a couple of examples. Our President is incredibly supportive of the center, so twice a year, we host an evening event at the president’s house, it has wine, that goes over well, and we bring in speakers, and we try to get speakers who will hit a variety of different areas of interest for faculty. And we often will get faculty at those events that don’t come to anything else, but then may come to other events, as they’ve seen the value in those events. So that’s been a good one. Diversity of programming has been really helpful, and I’m super proud of this. We run a summer conference. It’s a week after commencement, all faculty are off contract, and we will get roughly 40 to 50% of the full-time faculty showing up at our Summer Conference off-contract because we structure it in such a way that faculty are talking to each other. We’ve been very fortunate having some really, really amazing outside speakers, and then we give faculty the opportunity to do some chatting with their colleagues, get to see people that they don’t normally see, and that’s been another way. Part of it is having a big footprint on campus, Rebecca, and being involved in lots of things. I go to department meetings once a year. My associate director goes to department meetings. But I will say this, our office also has this footprint, because we not only oversee educational development, we oversee all of instructional design, we oversee all online course builds. We also oversee all student research. We also oversee the IRB. We also oversee sponsored research with our staff of two. So it’s hard to have something on campus that doesn’t involve reaching out to one of us once in a while, and that’s been really helpful. But it is, it’s challenging, because those resources are there and they’re often not used as much as they could be.
Rebecca: I think it’s important to ask how you went from a mug to overseeing that many things.
Chris: I switched schools, that helped, and then… I said this to John… this is 33 years of me being in higher ed, and you learn a lot when you’re just around in higher ed. And I’ve been tenured full professor for a long time, and I still teach, and that actually buys me credibility among the faculty, but I also manage budgets, that buys me credibility among the administrators. So that’s all been really helpful. It’s a needle you have to thread sometimes, and teaching centers are interesting because if you look at it, I mentioned before how we were able to show the utility of teaching centers. But as budgets get tighter and things begin to change across the landscape of higher ed, you’re starting to see teaching centers get shrunk and cut again. I know of at least two teaching centers at major institutions that were simply cut and all the people were fired because of budgetary crises. And I’m actually down four staff members right now, which I may or may not get back. So it is a very difficult time financially, and you work for a state system, so you know what that’s like. You look at the state budget. We were private. Stuff just happens in a private institution. It just happens. It’s not easy.
John: One of the things we found has been helpful to reaching out to more faculty is getting faculty who were in that wave of people who were interested in attending more workshops, having them do things and then present on it to other faculty, because the more faculty hear from their peers about how things have worked and made their classes more enjoyable, the more likely they are to show up and to try these things as well. There’s still some areas, though, that it’s difficult to reach and we keep trying.
Chris: Yeah, John, it’s a great concept you’re talking about, and that’s the Summer Conference. I do nothing at the summer conference but serve food. I simply show up and all my colleagues talk to each other. And that’s really the joy of it, because they see other people, and we have a SOTL fellowship program, and so they’ll present their scholarship of teaching and learning work, and the opportunity to do that is often gonna draw people in. It really is a grassroots thing. And one of the interesting things that Leslie and I saw when we were working on this book is that there’s no one way to run a center. It’s deeply contextualized into the context of the institution and the structure and culture of the institution. And some places have had a long culture and a long history. I was the first full time director at my place here, and by the way. I didn’t say this before, but we’re Springfield, Massachusetts. I know there’s Springfields in every state, and I feel like I’m contractually obliged to say, if you know anything about Springfield College in Massachusetts, we are the home of basketball. Kansas wants to claim it, but we are where basketball was invented, so I just have to say that. My president will be proud if she hears this.
Rebecca: These are important details.
Chris: These are important details.
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit more about how teaching centers can continue to help faculty align their practices so that we’re really teaching students how to learn and building that into the work that we’re doing, and help faculty see value in spending some time or allocating time in their classes to that kind of work.
Chris: Sure, the change in teaching practices over the last 30, 40, years has been pretty remarkable, and a lot of it has to do with the changing demographics of students entering college and the changing demographics of people teaching them. And what we’ve learned as we’ve looked at the science of learning is that human learning hasn’t shifted as much, but there are other outside variables. And I like to talk about, with faculty as we discuss these things, the notion that a student is going to walk into your class, any given student with a number of variables that are impacting what they’re doing in the classroom. Some of them you have some control over. Many of them you don’t. One of the things that you can help them with is a simple concept, such as attention. And I always start with attention, because it’s the one that faculty can begin to sort of wrap their head around. And I say you can help by using the classroom space in a way that is not going to cause them to have other distracting variables pull them away. And then I get the same comment, “well, students’ attention spans have changed.” And my response always is, “Nope, hasn’t. Hasn’t changed at all. What has changed is how many things they can be distracted by.” So you have some control over that. What are you going to do about that? And so it’s a way in, and then I can talk to them about… and because I’m a practitioner who does this research too… I can talk about data. Now, by the way, the data always get the bench scientists. They love that, because I’m talking about we have results that show this. Here’s the data, here’s the results, here’s the interpretation of the results. And things like I mentioned, retrieval practice, things like interleaving, or worked problems, the data are pretty strong that these kinds of procedures are effective. Now what is really, for me, the joy is working with a faculty member to see how that particular process works within their class, with their content, with what they’re trying to do, and try to really personalize it to their approach. One of the ones that my faculty seem to really like is this notion of interteaching. It’s a way to help students sort of structure their reading and so students get questions before they read, and they answer the questions, but they come in with two copies. One copy goes to you, one they sit and they discuss with a partner, and they look at where they answered the questions the same way, they answered them differently. They talk about it, and then everyone comes back together and talks about it. It seems like they’re going to not say much to each other, but they actually get pretty competitive about who said what on these things. But the real joy is not that they get it right or wrong, but it’s rather that they’ve thought through these things and now they’re engaging with the concepts in a different context. And I always talk to faculty about the key is to get the students to not just hear it, but to do something with it, to engage with it. And so how you structure that is the most important piece in terms of that they’re doing it, but how you do it is going to vary. So I think that that’s where I get some buy in. But I will say, Rebecca, it causes people to have to change their classes and they don’t like it, because you have your slides and you have your presentation, and you know what you’re going to do, and this opens up the probability, and I say, probability, not possibility, that class is going to be derailed sometimes. That’s okay. I love to tell faculty I teach two sections of intro sometimes back to back, one at eight and one at nine. I might be two chapters apart in those two classes because they’re going at different rates, and I’m okay with that.
John: So you encourage faculty to build in some forms of retrieval practice and interleaved practice, spaced practice and so forth. But sometimes students react poorly when you build that into your courses. Do you have any strategies you share with faculty in terms of getting buy-in from students? Because students, in general, in a number of studies, prefer to be lectured at, but we do know they learn more when they use evidence-based strategies. How can we get students to buy into that?
Chris: I’m going to tell a story while I talk about this. Part of it is being incredibly transparent about why students should be doing these kinds of things. And I think that’s pretty obvious, but I’m gonna tell you a story. I did this study at a different institution, and we never published it. We had two sections of neuroscience, and they both had 60 students. So we had 120 students total. And for the students, for exam one, the students were told in class A, we’re going to teach you how to concept map for studying. So we taught them how to concept map. Class B, study however you want. For exam two, we flipped it and we flipped it all the way through, and what the students found was when they concept mapped, they tended to do better than the other class, and then on their next exam, they did better when they concept mapped then when they didn’t concept map and we showed them the data. We showed them students tend to do better. For the final exam, we told the students, “Pick whatever you want. It doesn’t matter. You study however you want. We’re done with the study. Just study however you want.” They took the exams, and then we just asked them, “What approach did you take?” And the idea was, many of these students would adopt concept mapping, because it worked. Well, much to our chagrin, the number was so low that it was actually zero. None of them concept mapped. They all said, “I know it looked like it worked there, but my way is better.” So you’re absolutely right, John, it’s really difficult sometimes to convince people of these things. The approach I tell faculty to do is to introduce these things slowly into your classes, to build up and get small gains. So I’m a firm believer in formative assessment at various times throughout the semester, including my intro psych class, we do an assessment every class. It’s simple. It takes a minute or two, but it’s a way for me to gauge where they are. And I share the results with the students, and I talk to them about why the results might look the way they look, and I talk to my fellow colleagues about how to try to incorporate that in terms of how they’re doing it. The students, they do not like when you do retrieval practice in class, yet, if you give them the opportunity to build a Quizlet outside of class, they’re all over it, which is really retrieval practice. And so it’s a matter of trying to have that conversation. And it’s one of those things about human behavior, and you’re an economist, you know this. It’s so frustrating. People don’t do things that are good for them sometimes, and it’s frustrating, but you just keep working at it in a variety of ways. I know we’ve had success by hosting student faculty conversations, where the students and the faculty will talk to each other about what is going on in class, and it helps the students understand why the faculty members do things. It helps the faculty understand why students do things. But at the end of the day, it’s incredibly challenging, and I think it’s one of the things that makes this work. We’re going to be around for a while, because we really need to continue to work. And I will say one more thing, it also doesn’t help that faculty are incredibly resistant. And they’re resistant because you try something, the students don’t like it, you back off of it because the students don’t like it, even though it might take two or three iterations for them to like it. So there’s a lot of challenges there.
John: And we’re also coming up against students who’ve had 12 to 13 years of practice before entering college without using those techniques with high stakes exams and so forth. So there’s a lot to overcome there.
Chris: Yeah, and the high-stakes exam thing, we have a large group of physical therapists, physicians assistants, and OTs (occupational therapists), and they all have this national exam they have to sit for. And so they just want the stuff. They just want to know stuff. And I always try to tell them, you could know a lot, but you have a patient in front of you, and this is the example I give. I say, “If a patient comes to you and says, ‘My arm hurts when I bend it up’ and you say, ‘Okay, here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna do this.’ And then the patient comes back says, ‘I did that and it doesn’t help.’ You can’t look at the patient and say, ‘Well, boy, that’s terrible.’” You have to have another approach. You have to have something else to try. And I try to help them sort of work through that. Again, we’re fortunate here. I do go in and talk to almost all the grad students when they go from undergrad to grad, to talk about the application of knowledge. I also talk to all the undergraduates when they show up on campus to talk about some of these things too, with the idea that if we repeatedly talk to students about it and try to help show them, we may get more buy-in. There’s no panacea to this.
Rebecca: I think what you’ve both highlighted is that there’s resistance on both sides. There’s resistance from students and resistance from faculty, because change requires effort, and establishing new habits takes time and effort. But I like the idea of the dialoguing so that you’re working on change from both directions.
Chris: Yeah, and it’s interesting, I always ask faculty, especially like, if they give an assignment and say, “Why did you give that assignment?” And I’ll sometimes hear, “Well, it was time.” Well, that’s not a good enough answer. If you can’t relate that back to what you’re trying to get students to learn, then the students don’t know why they’re doing it, and they’re just doing it, which is the big issue with AI right now, is faculty are like, “Why are students AI-ing my assignments?” They see zero value. You work towards things that you value. You create value in education, students are more likely to work. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s more likely they’re going to do the work.
John: Earlier you suggested that one strategy you encourage is transparency, so that students understand why you’re asking them to do these things. Might that help in getting students to break the habits they’re developing of using AI for so many assignments now.
Chris: Yeah, I feel pretty strongly about this. I’ve done quite a bit of work in the AI field, working with AAC&U as well as with the American Psychological Association. And I think that the transparency with AI, we just have to do it at this point. What we need to do is lean into teaching AI literacy, teaching students about what AI can do, the limits of AI, showing them some of the limits of AI, and allowing them to see this as a tool, not as learning, but as a tool to help them learn more effectively. John, you were teaching at the time. I remember in 1995 we got essentially a graphic browser called Mosaic, and I could actually see the internet versus just typing things into gopher. And I thought my life has just gotten better. It’s just gotten better, and I was able to do things I couldn’t do before. Well, AI has done the same thing. I can’t tell you how many times n ow, when I’m generating a data set for statistics, I give it the parameters, and it just generates the data for me and it comes out the way I want it to. I used to calculate those numbers, and it was terribly difficult to do. Now it just does it, and that takes the time from that for me to give students feedback or do other things. Well, the students, just like with the calculator, can use it in a way, and I’m not saying it’s a calculator. It’s much different than that. I’m not saying that, but it’s a tool that we can use, if we can figure out how to leverage it. But transparency is key. We are talking right now about creating a guidance document through the center that’s going to be shared with faculty and students about how the center and how academic affairs views AI and the value of it, as well as some of the pitfalls and concerns and some of the caveats that need to be around it. Because I think, even if you hate it, and we have faculty who truly hate it, they truly hate it, it’s not going anywhere, and the students have access to it on their phones. It’s there, so we have to figure out what to do with it.
Rebecca: One of the things I want to underscore about what you just said is that you’re going to develop a guide for faculty and students and that you’re going to share it to both parties. And I think that’s a practice that institutions could just do more generally, so that both sets of individuals are getting the same information, because especially around AI like literacy is necessary for all members of the campus community, not just students.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. We have a task force right now we’re running with my associate director, which involves five staff members and five faculty, and we’re going to cycle in some students so that we can sort of figure out what we need to be talking to people about. Our staff, many of them are afraid to use it because they’re afraid that it’s going to work them out of a job. But we say “No, this is gonna make your lives better if you use this.” So we’re trying to work through some of that. But the transparency is really key. I would argue that for everything, Rebecca. I’m a firm believer in being incredibly transparent with my students about all sorts of things that I think help move the learning process along, and that’s been really valuable for me as an educator and with my colleagues as a faculty member, as an educational developer.
John: And one of the things we’ve been advocating is that faculty have these conversations at the start of the semester with their students about what uses of AI are appropriate to see if they can get some degree of buy in. Do you think that might be helpful in convincing students that they should use it in ways that support their learning, rather than ways that serve as shortcuts to their learning?
Chris: Yeah, my associate director, Matt Citron, developed a system for one of our majors because the faculty really wanted it. And it’s not a new system, people are using it, but they just have a system built into Brightspace where an assignment will have either red or green or yellow light saying: red, don’t use AI; yellow, use it with caution; green, do what you want with it. But even before they see that, there’s a whole conversation about what “use it with caution” or “go crazy with it” means, how you’re going to involve that, and what you’re going to do with it, and how you’re going to report what you got out of it to the instructor, so they know exactly where this is coming from and how it looks. Again, It’s a transparency. But, you know, I’ll say this, I am continuously amazed when faculty are trying to sneak things in and trick students, because learning is not about being tricked, man, it’s about being able to do things more effectively. And I even do this, and faculty don’t love this. But when I give multiple choice… I’d really moved away from it…but a few years back, when I gave multiple choice, I told students, look, if you don’t like my answers, give me your own. If I like it, I’ll give you points for it. Or if you think my answers aren’t good enough, and you could write it better, fine. Write it underneath the multiple choice, I’ll read it. I mean, students don’t often do it, but every once in a while they do. It’s not like I have the magic knowledge, that’s the thing. I just know more about this than you do. I’ve learned more, I can think about it differently than you can, but let’s talk about it. And I have conversations with students after exams. I have conversations with students about their papers. I’ve taken to shooting video feedback to all my students on assignments and their responsibility is to give me video feedback, telling me how they understood my feedback and what they intended to do with it. So it becomes this virtual conversation. I talked to my faculty about that. Teaching and learning is an innately humane relational process, and the more we can continue to build that in, the better off our students and our faculty are going to be. But Rebecca, it’s work. It’s work.
Rebecca: It is work.
Chris: It is. I have two classes. I have 67 students this upcoming semester, as well as running a teaching center. It’s a lot of work. I grew up as a first kid to go to college, first one to graduate. I feel pretty lucky to do this job. I’ve worked other jobs, man, I built fences. This is way better than building fences. This is way better than building fences.
Rebecca: Sounds like we’re trying to take them down, actually.
Chris: Yeah.
Rebecca: One of the things that we’re seeing with budget crises across higher ed is sometimes increases in class sizes, and you just talked about how deeply humane and relational [LAUGHTER] teaching and learning is. Do you have some strategies for student engagement and some of that relation building in those larger classes.
Chris: Yeah, it’s a great question, and it’s interesting because at Springfield, and I’m not sure about the size of Oswego, but for us, a big class is like 60 students. Faculty freak out when they hit 60. And the fact is, I think that relational piece is going to look different depending on the size of your class and how you’re able to navigate that. I think part of it is understanding a variety of ways to give feedback. So I tell faculty, in particular with large classes that I would encourage them to do small assignments and give feedback to percentages of students every class to ensure that every student gets written feedback across time, but they don’t have to get all the same written feedback every time. You would never not read a student’s work, but you would give more substantive written feedback to a percentage of your students, but work in ways to develop those kinds of touch points. It’s not always easy. Sometimes it involves using the LMS, sometimes it involves getting there early, but being aware that your students, if they identify you as a human, they’re much more likely to be kind to you. So it’s really a matter of trying to figure out a way to allow yourself to be perceived as a human in students’ eyes. That’s idiosyncratic to the instructor. My students know a lot about my life. Part of it was I was a single dad for six years. I taught with my kid in a Snuggie. There was no way for my students to not be aware of what I was doing. I had a child strapped to my chest. She fell asleep. I told my students, come closer. She’s sleeping. I can’t wake her up. So I’ve always been pretty transparent with my students about lots of things. It makes me human, and I think part of it is allowing the students to see that you’re human too at whatever level you’re comfortable, whatever level people are comfortable, some people are more private. I get that, but I think you have to allow that humanity to kind of show through. I’ll say one more thing about that. If nothing else, you went and got a degree in this discipline. Show your passion for your discipline. Let your passion for your discipline come through however it does for you. I can’t talk about some psych topics without being jazzed. I’m a psycholinguist by training. I can’t talk about language without being super excited about language. It’s fun. I was just in Europe. I was looking at things written 1000 years ago. My camera is filled with pictures of stone tablets. My wife’s like, “What is this?” I said, trust me, “That’s linear B, man, that’s good stuff, right there.”
John: One of the issues that we do hear a lot of concerns from, especially since the pandemic, although it seems to be a little bit less last year than in the previous years, is students seem a little bit less engaged with some of their classwork, that students are more likely just to blow off some assignments and not complete them. And also, many faculty complain about having lower attendance in their classes. You mentioned using polling as a strategy. Are there other strategies that faculty can use to help increase that connection, or to get students a bit more engaged so they don’t disappear on us.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, the mental health crisis has really had its fingers in lots of this, and students’ anxiety has led them to be less willing to chat in class, less willing to engage in class, and with the devices they get to class, and they used to talk to each other, they sort of look at their phones, and so that’s an issue. I am pretty transparent about what I expect my students to do, and I talk to faculty about stating your expectations clearly and being open to knowing that students are going to sometimes struggle with this. I’ve got a couple of simple little tips. So for example, I give this tip to faculty. Have students answer questions and just write them down on a note card without their name, and then they take their note card and they stand up and they walk around the room, they hand it to someone, they take theirs, and then they take that note that note card and hand it to someone else, and then they take that, and then they just pass them around. And then I can call on any student, and all they’re doing is reading the note card, and so that helps them sort of see that it’s okay. I’ll tell you another secret… my students, whenever they find out about this… they get really mad, but I do this. I collect note cards at the beginning of the semester with all my students’ names on it, and I tell them, sometimes I’m going to randomly call on them to see if they know an answer. And they’re always softball, simple, very easy questions. So I’ll shuffle the cards and call someone. I will almost always call a name that is not on the card. I’ll call the name of the student who I know hasn’t said much, but knows what’s going on. So they have a chance to do something in class, be successful, and shine, and then they’re more likely to talk. And students don’t know what name I draw off the card. It doesn’t matter to me. It could be blank cards for all they know, but it’s a way to get the students… and again, as a psychologist, I look for ways to sort of shape that behavior up. Also, I tell faculty: “Get the class early, greet students when they come in, just talk to them.” I don’t know if this happens at Oswego, but this is a Springfield College thing. Our students thank us. At the end of every class, I get fist bumps as my students are walking by after every class. And I’m not unique. Lots of our students do that, and part of it is a culture that has built up over campus, over time, this is before my time. This is sort of who our students are. And so you work with that culture, okay, if the students are gonna do that, then I know they’re polite. Okay, good. Then I can work with that. Your students might be different. You know what they are. You try to work with that. It’s like I say to people all the time when faculty say, “Well, what can I do to be a better teacher?” I can’t pull a book off the shelf and say, “Here, do this.” I have to know who you are, who your students are, and all of that. And so it’s why the field is so much fun. I get to know lots of faculty, and I get to work with lots of faculty.
Rebecca: One of the things that we’ve been talking a little bit about, are some budget cuts in higher ed and teaching centers being on the chopping block? What are some of the things that you’re concerned about in this space?
Chris: So you don’t want to open that door too much. I really appreciate this in part, because I think there is a sense with teaching centers right now that if we let them go, we’re going to be okay. And I think faculty need the resource, even if it’s a perceived resource. My wife and I talk about it all the time. Perceived help is often as useful as the help you get, and so us existing is really important, and I worry that teaching centers are going to start to shrink, and it’s going to make faculty struggle in their teaching. So I hope that we continue to talk about these things and I appreciate having the opportunity to talk about it.
Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?
Chris: So what’s next for me? I have an idea for another writing project. I want to look at intentional teaching. I want to talk about barriers that make it difficult for faculty to be as effective as they can be in the classroom, starting with things like lack of pedagogical understanding and going through variables such as student variables, classroom size, physical space, etc. Because I think we need to take a harder look at what we are doing, knowing the stakes are higher than ever at being able to be effective at what we do. We need to be incredibly intentional about creating really strong learning environments for our students to succeed. And I think our livelihood depends on it. Listen, I teach at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast, and have either you ever been to Springfield, Massachusetts?
Rebecca: Yeah.
Chris: So from my office, if there were no trees, I could see two other colleges less than a mile away from me. So there’s lots of schools and fewer students. We just need to be really good at what we do. So I’m thinking about that. The other thing is, I am excited to be building out some additional resources for our faculty that I think are going to support them with short burst sort of faculty development that we’re building with our media team, which has been really fun. So we’ve got lots of stuff coming. We’re excited to get the year started and to do these things and to share them out. I’ve lots of ideas.
John: Well, thank you for talking to us. We very much appreciate the conversation and look forward to future conversations.
Chris: Yeah, thank you both so much, and I appreciate having this conversation. I know that you folks talk to lots of people. I went through, and I just have you know I run every day. You’ve gotten me through many runs, because your times is just about right, so I really appreciate that, and you’ve talked to some people that I have deep affection for. So I really appreciate being part of this, and thank you for all the work that you’re doing for teaching and learning. I think it’s super important for people to hear from these other people, so thanks.
Rebecca: Yeah, thank you. We’re looking forward to sharing out this episode with our audience, and we’re grateful for all the people that we’ve gotten to have on the show, you included.
John: And that’s why we keep doing it. [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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