Category: growth mindset

437. Impostor Phenomenon

Posted in cognitive psychology, diversity, emotion, engagement, equity, first-generation students, growth mindset, higher education, learning, motivation, teaching
March 18, 2026

Impostor phenomena can deter college students, especially students from historically underrepresented groups, from pursuing majors in STEM disciplines. In this episode, Sara Kien joins us to discuss strategies that can reduce imposter phenomena and reduce equity gaps in student success.

Sara is an Associate Teaching Professor at Northern Arizona University. She has a PhD in cognitive psychology and recently completed a masters degree in information and data science. Sara is an award winning educator with over 20 years of experience and the author of Data Science and AI in Psychology, an interactive eTextbook on data science, big data, and machine learning in psychology.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Impostor phenomena can deter college students, especially students from historically underrepresented groups, from pursuing majors in STEM disciplines. In this episode, we discuss strategies that one faculty member has used to reduce impostor phenomena and reduce equity gaps in student success.

[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]

John: Our guest today is Sara Kien. Sara is an Associate Teaching Professor at Northern Arizona University. She has a PhD in cognitive psychology and recently completed a masters degree in information and data science. Sara is an award winning educator with over 20 years of experience and the author of Data Science and AI in Psychology, an interactive eTextbook on data science, big data, and machine learning in psychology. Welcome Sara.

Sara: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.

John: Thanks for joining us.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Sara, are you drinking tea with us today?

Sara: I am. I was so excited about this part of the podcast. This tea, I have to say, is pretty legit. I love tea, and I put time and effort into tea, yeah, so I was really excited about this. So my tea comes from a local company in the southwest called Old Barrel Tea Company, and so we have one of their flagship stores here in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is where Northern Arizona University is located. And so they just have a wide range of tea options. And so this tea today, I chose berry, and then I even have some special honey, like oak-infused honey added to this tea. And so I was just really excited to get my tea ready and to brag about my tea, and also to plug the Old Barrel Tea Company, because they’re fantastic. and the oak

John: And the oak-infused honey certainly fits with the old barrel, [LAUGHTER] nicely.

Sara: Yeah.

Rebecca: Yeah, it sounds right up. John’s alley.

Sara: Wonderful.

Rebecca: Today I have Scottish Breakfast tea.

Sara: Hmmm

John: Good. I had that a couple times yesterday, but today I have a ginger peach green tea.

Sara: Oh yum.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your work addressing impostor phenomenon and your work in redesigning data science classes in psychology. What does the data suggest about the prevalence of impostor phenomenon among college students?

Sara: That’s a great question. It’s also a bit of a complicated question, because it really depends on how impostor phenomenon is measured, and it also really depends on the context. So just to provide a little background regarding this construct, impostor phenomenon, which is also commonly known as impostor syndrome… so I think a lot of folks will be familiar with that terminology… was actually coined in 1978 by Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes as part of their work examining or investigating highly successful women who had a really difficult time internalizing their success. And so at that time, they coined the term impostor syndrome, and over the years, increasingly, the research has suggested that impostor syndrome, or now as we refer to it, impostor phenomenon is highly prevalent. It’s quite pervasive, actually, with recent findings suggesting that, in terms of just generalized impostor phenomenon, rates might be high as 80% in the population of individuals experiencing a sense of impostorism. And so what is impostor phenomenon? What are some of the defining features or characteristics? Currently the field identifies three elements. So the first is a really intense or chronic feeling of self doubt in spite of overwhelming evidence of achievement. So really just a belief that you’re a fraud. That’s really the heart of impostor, right? That I’m an impostor, that I’m a fraud, that I don’t belong here, that I’m here by accident. Everybody else belongs here, but I don’t. And so that second element, like that I’m here by accident, is discounting our success, or believing that our success is undeserved, and that we attribute our success to factors other than ability, so luck, for example, or maybe in the case of academics, a lenient professor. So I received an A in that course because my professor is really lenient and it’s just an easy course. Or I just worked harder than everyone else, but everybody else just has, like, natural ability that I lack. And again, I just really want to emphasize that it’s not just any feeling of self doubt, but really a feeling of self doubt in the face of conflicting evidence suggesting otherwise. So like in many cases, in spite of overwhelming achievement. And so how can we experience such levels of self doubt that contradicts the evidence, by discounting the evidence. And then the third element is just a fear of exposure. So if I’m a fraud and I don’t belong and I’m an impostor, then I’m just constantly sort of hyper vigilant about covering my tracks, and very concerned about being exposed as a fraud. As I mentioned, there’s recent evidence to suggest that rates of academic impostor phenomenon can be as high as 80% in the general population, and for this reason, recently, researchers have moved away from “impostor syndrome” as a relevant term to “impostor phenomenon,” because that level of prevalence really suggests potentially more systemic issues, rather than individual level factors. So syndrome suggests that there are issues at the level of the individual. In addition, it’s not a clinical diagnosis, syndrome really often refers to something that’s more clinical in nature. This is a common set of thoughts and feelings that are experienced by many individuals, quite commonly. With respect to academia, more specifically, the estimates for the prevalence of academic impostor phenomenon vary quite widely, again, often depending on how it’s measured. So, in some cases, the measurement might just include feelings of impostorism. But in other cases, measures might include all three defining elements that I mentioned earlier. And really one of the issues has been that within academia, or academics, more specifically, we haven’t had a relevant measure of academic impostor phenomenon. And so the evidence suggests that the rates range from maybe 20% to 50% or higher, depending on the degree program, depending on the context. And so in degree programs that tend to be more competitive, where there’s an emphasis on like hyper-productivity and the stakes are really high, like in medicine, for example, we see higher levels of impostorism. And again, that just highlights potentially systemic level issues, system level processes that are contributing to how individuals are experiencing their success and how they’re interpreting their experience within academia. So, fortunately, recently, some of my colleagues have developed an academic impostor phenomenon measure. So Valerie Todd and David Mcilroy published a validated measure of academic impostor phenomenon in 2025. Recently, as part of a joint effort within that collaborative team, we have been applying that specific measure in a program of research that’s examining academic impostor phenomenon. We’re very excited about the potential to examine rates of impostor phenomenon in the academic context, more specifically. And then in our case, as a research team, we’re all psychologists, so we’re starting with psychology majors and exploring rates of impostor phenomenon within the field of psychology. I guess one thing I could add, actually, before I say a little bit more about our program of research with respect to the validated measure that was recently developed by Todd and Mcilroy, that that measure is available for anybody who’s interested in the Journal of Current Psychology. And then the other thing I wanted to mention, in terms of addressing prevalence within academia and the call for a more validated measure, there’s an excellent review of the literature that was published in 2023 by Dana Ménard and Laura Chittle in the journal Review of Education. And so for anybody who’s interested in more details regarding prevalence and measurement, that’s a really excellent review.

Rebecca: It’s exciting to hear that there’s new measurement tools available, because even in casual conversation with students, in my context, it’s orientation for all the graduate students at our institution, they all easily say, “Yes, I know what that is. [LAUGHTER] I’ve had experience with that.” And when we bring it up and try to address it as a group, there’s a really high affect towards that in acknowledgement that that’s an important thing that we’re addressing in our orientation for these students.

Sara: Exactly. So that’s such a great point, because that actually leads to the next thing that I wanted to say. But just to address that specifically, as we’ve been developing this program of research, the number of students who are interested in getting involved in the research, either as participants or as undergraduate/graduate level researchers, or even just colleagues, like other faculty. So this is pervasive throughout academia, feelings of impostorism and self doubt. In spite of academic achievement. The number of individuals who want to get involved in this work really is quite overwhelming. For students. It’s very relevant, especially within the field of psychology, as I’m sure is the case in other fields, students really want to make a difference, and they’re very familiar with their experience and the experience of their peers, and they want to get involved in work that they think will be supportive and help to support wellbeing among their peers more generally. And the same is true for faculty. Of course, faculty care about student success and want to do everything they can to support students and so learning more about this phenomenon and the factors that predict this phenomenon, or intervention strategies and even to support their colleagues or even help to enhance their own wellbeing within the context of their career. It’s just really relevant. It’s very personally relevant for many folks in academia. So this research team includes Valerie Todd and David Mcilroy, who are both at institutions in the United Kingdom. So this is part of an international collaboration, but also Jennifer Coleman at Western New Mexico University and Ivette Merced at Irvine Valley College. We’ve started investigating rates or prevalence of impostor phenomenon among psych majors with this new tool, and what we found is that, as you just mentioned earlier, actually the majority of students report some level of impostor phenomenon. And then what’s also interesting with respect to prevalence, and so I mentioned that it’s a little complicated because it turns out it’s context specific. As part of this work, I’ve actually been leading one line of research in this larger program that’s focused on supporting students, supporting psych majors in more STEM-focused courses as a part of their psychology degree program. So we contextualized this tool to measure academic impostor phenomenon in relation to statistics, more specifically, or research methods more specifically, or psychology in general, in addition to the more generalized measure. And what we found is statistically significant differences in average scores of academic impostor phenomenon depending on context. For psych majors, academic impostor phenomenon in relation to statistics scoring significantly higher than other types of AIP. So again, what’s the prevalence? It really depends on how we measure it. It depends on the context, it depends on the domain, and we’re seeing like just a growing body of research and literature in this area. So I think it’ll be really interesting to continue exploring this question moving forward.

John: So you mentioned some ways in which it varies. You mentioned in statistics classes, for example, there seems to be higher rates. You mentioned earlier that in the more competitive fields, there seems to be more. What other factors seem to result in higher levels of impostorism.

Sara: So, in terms of the factors that predict impostorism, there are a few individual level factors, but we’re seeing increasingly that the individual level factors really interact with what’s happening more at the systems level, with systemic factors. Some predictors include some personality characteristics. There’s some evidence to suggest that neuroticism, for example, predicts impostor phenomenon more generally, as well as academic impostor phenomenon to the extent that that’s been measured in academic context. Perfectionism is strongly correlated with academic impostor phenomenon. We also see other correlates. So for example, academic impostor phenomenon, and impostor phenomenon more generally, is associated with mental health issues like depression and anxiety, psychological distress, burnout. But one thing to note here, in addressing these correlates and the factors that predict academic impostor phenomenon, is there’s really a lack of research that investigates causality. So it’s difficult to know, for example, whether feelings of impostor phenomenon give rise to perfectionism or lower self esteem, which is another correlate of impostor phenomenon, or whether lower self esteem and perfectionism predispose individuals to higher levels of impostor phenomenon. So it’s hard to discern the nature of that relationship, but some other factors as we start thinking about like, “Well, what’s happening at the individual level versus a more systemic level?” There’s been a body of work examining demographic differences in impostor phenomenon. So Kevin Cokley at the University of Texas at Austin has been studying impostor phenomenon in academic contexts for over 10 years, and has published some really interesting work in this area, and also in the area of mental health implications of impostor phenomenon. And again, that review that I mentioned earlier, the Ménard and Chittle review, published in 2023, does a really nice job of highlighting essentially what is intersectionality, or the interactive nature of individual level variables and what’s happening at the systems level. So with respect to demographic factors, a number of researchers have explored group differences between individuals who are historically minoritized in certain settings or pathways, and examined variability among those populations. And ultimately, the findings are mixed, with some research suggesting that there are group differences, for example, gender differences or differences based on race or ethnicity, while other research suggesting that there are no group differences. And so follow up research has revealed that with respect to group differences, the answer is, “it depends.” So, there aren’t just inherent differences in academic impostor phenomenon across demographic groups, with certain minoritized groups, for example, Women in Data Science focused degree programs or computer science focused degree programs. In the field of data science, for example, women only make up 20 to 25% of all data scientists. So in fields where women are historically minoritized or are underrepresented, we don’t necessarily see higher levels of academic impostor phenomenon among women. What matters is the context. So whether the context that women are in highlights those disparities. So is there evidence of racial discrimination or gender discrimination in these environments? Is there evidence of prejudice? Are there sufficient role models who can serve in a mentoring capacity for individuals who might be underrepresented within a particular industry or domain, and is there access to representation? In addition, often environments that are more competitive in nature tend to exacerbate impostor phenomenon for individuals who might be historically minoritized or underrepresented in certain domains. And so really, what the research suggests is that academic impostor phenomenon may serve as a mediator or a mechanism by which prejudice and discrimination underrepresentation, hyper productivity and competitiveness can impact mental health. So without that context, group differences in impostor phenomenon may be similar, but if you add those stressors, then we might see an exacerbation of impostor phenomenon, in the sense of: “I don’t belong here. I don’t belong. I don’t fit in. I don’t know how I got here. I’m at risk of being exposed for my lack of ability,” which then can have implications for mental health and for future outcomes.

Rebecca: You’ve talked a bit about the prevalence and that it’s pretty common that people have some of these feelings. What are the consequences if students experience impostor phenomenon in their persistence?

Sara: The consequences can be widespread and cascading, unfortunately, and different people handle the experience of impostor phenomenon in different ways. Generally speaking, the research suggests that some of the most prevalent or pervasive kinds of consequences include effects on mental health… so, depression, anxiety, psychological distress, burnout. There is also a relationship with lower self esteem, lower academic self confidence or self efficacy, so your belief in your ability, which aligns well with those three elements of impostor phenomenon… maladaptive perfectionism, so a kind of perfectionism in which you set almost unattainable standards and goals which can exacerbate feelings of distress and burnout and exhaustion. And in turn, these mental health struggles can lead to unfortunate outcomes, for example, procrastination, like, how do we cope with these kinds of mental health issues, right? And how do we cope with these distressing thoughts and feelings related to self doubt? So procrastination, avoidance, and withdrawing can lead to delayed graduation. In the case of students, we might change degree programs. In the case of faculty, we might change careers. We might leave academia and pivot and pursue a different line of work. Sometimes students are at risk of dropping out. Another unfortunate outcome that can occur is a type of self sabotage, in which students become less risk taking because beliefs about their lack of ability, in other words, are less likely to pursue certain scholarship opportunities, or maybe less likely to pursue graduate school, or, in the case of professionals within academia, are less likely to pursue promotion. So that’s one kind of consequence or outcome, another outcome related to perfectionism. And then what we see also, in relation to certain personality traits like conscientiousness, is that we see on the flip side, some individuals compensate over-preparation, which can be a mechanism leading to exhaustion and burnout. So then again, we see, in terms of the impact on academic performance like GPA, the findings are mixed because many individuals who are experiencing impostor phenomenon overcompensate through over-preparation and perfectionism, so they’re still dealing with the mental health struggles associated with impostor phenomenon, but because of a fear of being exposed, they’re working harder than anyone else to try to hide what they perceive as their lack of ability. The language I’m using is like “t\They’re doing this, [LAUGHTER] you know, this is what they do,” but just as full disclosure, most of us are familiar with this phenomenon. So even for myself, on a daily basis, I’m challenged with feelings of impostorism. Even preparing for this podcast, I have a perception that there’s a certain level of expertise that I should be demonstrating as part of this podcast interview, have self doubt at times about my level of expertise and whether I can communicate effectively. For me, I fall on the more perfectionist side of the equation, so that I’m at risk of over-preparing and starting to feel self doubt about whether I can cover everything that I want to cover. A little later, we’ll talk about strategies and intervention for addressing feelings of impostor phenomenon. But I have to take a step back and recognize what’s happening and reframe my experience, and just to highlight that this is a common experience, and even for those of us, or maybe even especially for those of us who are conducting research in this area, we’re motivated by similar kinds of experiences that we’ve had that have impacted us throughout our educational journey or throughout our career. So with respect to students, for educators who really care about students and who are really student centered, it’s really important to consider the mental health struggles that they might be experiencing and the ways in which those could be impacting their performance in the classroom as a function of academic impostor phenomenon, including whether students participate in classroom discussions or how engaged they are in group work. If they are concerned about a sense of belonging, whether they belong, they might feel less comfortable sharing or engaging with other students, with their peers, and in particular, if they feel that there’s risk of being exposed as a fraud. So in many cases, a student who may seem withdrawn isn’t necessarily disinterested or uninterested in the course material, they might be dealing with significant feelings of self doubt, fear of exposure, that are leading to mental health struggles, all of which might be associated with their behavior in the classroom.

John: A while back, we interviewed Peter Arcidiacono, who was one of several authors of a study that looked at the attrition rates from students in STEM majors. In particular, what they found in the study was that women, on average, did better in introductory STEM courses, yet they were more likely to not pursue a major in it, even though they were interested in a major, in large part because of the lower grades received in STEM classes. Is it likely, perhaps, that impostorism may be one of the factors where the signal of lower grades in some disciplines may encourage some people to leave the discipline, especially if they’re already underrepresented in those areas.

Sara: Yeah, absolutely. impostor phenomenon could be one of probably several factors that are relevant, like one of the things that unfortunately occurs in more competitive degree programs, like STEM degree programs, a kind of a culture and environment where showing struggle can be penalized, where there’s additional pressure to maintain a perfect facade. If an individual is from a historically minoritized background with respect to that degree program or that domain, and is experiencing a fear of exposure for a lack of ability, may be less likely to reach out for support, may be less likely to engage in help seeking behaviors where they share openly about their concerns and their doubt and their struggle, and therefore are less likely to receive support, both in terms of mental health, but also academically. And then, as I mentioned earlier, what are the factors that predict persistence. What helps the student to be more likely to persist and to follow their interests and to follow their passion? Self efficacy is a strong correlate. So belief in your abilities, which is undermined by impostor phenomenon… faculty support which is less likely to occur if students are afraid of being exposed, and if the culture, as I mentioned, emphasizes projecting an image of success, so less likely to access faculty support if we feel penalized for sharing our struggles. Aso, you know, one major issue with respect to impostor phenomenon is that we don’t talk about it enough. It’s such a relief to hear that more institutions are introducing these discussions for incoming classes of students, because it’s not just what students can be doing, what faculty can be doing, but really what needs to be happening at the institutional level, where we’re normalizing impostor phenomenon so that students feel like they’re not alone in these experiences, and they feel more comfortable reaching out for support and sharing their struggles, especially in highly competitive contexts. For students who start to experience any type of failure, who are internalizing their failure, but failing to acknowledge their success and maybe even essentializing that failure as an indicator of lack of ability, those failures are pretty high-stakes situations. For those students, that’s an indicator of lack of ability that suggests that you’re not cut out for that field or that discipline. In those more competitive environments, it is the case that grades and research productivity and networking success are pretty high stakes, so early evidence of failure can feel catastrophic in those types of competitive environments where the stakes are so high. And again, if we had more opportunities to normalize the experience, more faculty support around these issues, potentially students would feel more comfortable reaching out and getting the support they need early. I really want to emphasize that it’s not students who are self selecting out. It’s really systemic, which is why, at an institutional level, we need to provide these supports. Without an institutional support system, it’s really the system pushing students out, especially students who are historically underrepresented, who maybe also feel lack of role models that they can reach out to, or lack of representation, which exacerbates their experience of impostor phenomenon.

Rebecca: You’ve talked a bit about the importance of normalizing impostor phenomenon as a way of systemically starting to address some of these issues, because if more of us in leadership roles or in an educator role are also modeling that we experience this too, then it becomes less scary for a student to also admit those same experiences. What are some of the strategies that you’re using in your own classrooms, to start to mitigate the feelings of impostor phenomenon and the potential outcomes that can result?

Sara: That’s a great question. I feel like there are some strategies that I’ve been implementing for several years, and I also continue to improve in my ability to provide support in this area. Normalizing, as I mentioned, is a really important one, and we can also model our own impostor phenomenon experience in an effort to normalize. And what I find is that students experience great relief in learning that an individual who’s in a position that they might aspire towards also has experienced similar kinds of feelings. And really, what I found is that it helps to really open students up, and then students are more likely to share some of their own experiences of self doubt and concern. In my case, I’m teaching research methods and data science courses within the field of psychology, and the statistics and research methods courses for psych majors tend to be the most dreaded courses. And as a woman within the field of psychology, teaching data science, where women are underrepresented by and large (even in the subfield of quantitative psychology, at the upper levels, we see an under representation of women), I think it provides additional support for students with diverse gender identities to relate, in particular, to a role model who is underrepresented with respect to that particular domain or within that field or subfield. And so I do as much as I can to just share openly and honestly, to allow myself to be vulnerable in a public setting with students. For me personally, that’s required that I do my own work in addressing my feelings of self doubt and trying to understand the source of those feelings. Then that leads to the second highly effective strategy, which is cognitive restructuring or reframing. It’s quite normal to have thoughts and feelings related to self doubt, even if we understand the source of those thoughts and feelings, it’s still common for us to experience those thoughts and feelings, but we don’t necessarily need to attach ourselves to those thoughts and feelings. So reframing those experiences when we notice them can be highly effective, and there are a few different strategies for doing that. Mindfulness meditation is really helpful in becoming increasingly aware of automatic thoughts and emotions that arise, and becoming aware of those thoughts and emotions in a non-judgmental way. So mindfulness meditation is often a strategy that’s suggested in relation to cognitive reframing, but once we notice those thoughts and feelings, we can apply a new frame, for example, a growth-mindset frame. One thing I should emphasize is that there’s actually some evidence to suggest that the outcomes associated with impostor phenomenon are not necessarily negative, that there are actually some positive outcomes associated with impostor phenomenon. For many of us, if we experience feelings of self doubt, it can be a motivator. It can motivate us to learn more and grow in our abilities and to work harder. So when we experience feelings of self doubt, we can actually reframe even that impostor phenomenon from a growth-mindset perspective, like these feelings are just like my mind and body’s way of helping me to feel motivated. Of course, if they become maladaptive and start giving rise to depression and anxiety, then it’s important to start addressing those specific thoughts. More specifically, one example is if we’re feeling self doubt and concern about our ability in relation to any academic task or a particular academic course. Instead of identifying a specific end result that relates to social comparison, like I need to be at a particular level, we can reframe our experiences just in a perspective of growth. You know, I’m going to put effort into this activity that I care about, and my goal is to simply continue growing and developing in my experience, regardless of standards of success that are presented within a particular field or within a particular profession, so to reframe in terms of like interest and growth and effort, rather than essentialized abilities that have a particular end goal. One helpful approach to cognitive reframing is to reframe our thoughts and emotions in terms of growth mindset. So a growth mindset emphasizes effort and improvement, even in the face of failure as a function of effort. So really understanding that our abilities grow out of interest, passion and effort. In contrast, a perspective of traits or abilities as fixed suggests that these traits and abilities are innate, that we’re born with particular traits and abilities, so that failure reflects a lack of ability. Really, failure is an opportunity to continue to learn and grow, and imagine that we could continue to improve as a function of effort, even in the face of failure. So that would be an example of cognitive reframing in relation to growth mindset. And research has shown that growth mindset, in particular, is a really helpful approach to cognitive reframing.

John: Are there other things at the institutional level that can be done to reduce the impact of impostor phenomenon?

Sara: Yeah, and actually, I can say a few more things about instructor-level support. So in addition to normalizing and cognitive reframing, other approaches that are helpful that I also try to encourage in my own classroom include helping to support sense of belonging. So opportunities for students to work together in meaningful ways where they actually get to know each other and can support each other in accomplishing a challenge or a task is an effective way to help offset feelings of impostorism, but also to allow students opportunities for support among their peers. And as part of the research that I’ve been conducting in collaboration with my research team, we’ve actually started developing more formalized interventions that incorporate all of those elements, so normalizing, reframing, cognitive reframing, the value of faculty support and modeling, the relevance of role models that students can relate to, and increasing sense of belonging. We’re just currently launching a study that specifically examines the effectiveness of an intervention that includes all of those different elements. At the institutional level, some strategies can include integrating mental health support into the curriculum, increasing access to mental health support for students, normalizing at the departmental or institutional level, which is something we’ve already discussed, having those conversations for, like incoming cohorts of students. There’s research showing that faculty who have greater self efficacy in addressing diversity are more effective at addressing diversity in the classroom, and that can be particularly relevant for addressing impostor phenomenon that’s exacerbated among historically underrepresented students, students from racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation backgrounds that are not necessarily represented within their fields of interest. Some of the findings coming out of our teams include the importance of classroom comfort and faculty support, so normalizing and discussing these issues, not just at the level of student, but also among faculty, providing opportunities for faculty to learn and share about their own impostor experiences, so that they are better equipped to bring these kinds of strategies into the classroom or to have these kinds of conversations with students.

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

Sara: The focus for our research team, as I mentioned, is really to continue this intervention work, and members of our research team continue to offer workshops as well. We give talks and seminars related to impostor phenomenon that can help to support faculty and staff and students within academia as they address impostor phenomenon in their own lives, but also that offer strategies and tools and techniques that they can bring with them into their departments and into their classrooms. We want to continue to expand the research to include more diverse contexts, disciplines, and even more diverse institutions. So right now, we’re focused on psychology majors, but we are really looking forward to extending this research to other disciplines and other institutions. As I mentioned, it’s an international collaboration, and we’ve had a lot of interest among other faculty and researchers who want to join this effort. And so we really want to expand our research to include international contexts, and then to continue to develop workshops to support faculty training around academic impostor phenomenon. We’ve discussed the possibility of writing a book together that addresses, in particular, context specificity of impostor phenomenon. So one of the novel findings that we are bringing to the literature is the variability in academic impostor phenomenon in relation to even specific courses within a degree program, in relation to different contexts within a discipline. And so I think it’s really important to continue investigating intersectionality and the complexity of impostor phenomenon. Under what circumstances do particular contexts give rise to impostor phenomenon? So it’s not just like for whom, but for whom under what circumstances. And another element of that is, for whom, or under what circumstances, are particular strategies or interventions effective. So there probably won’t be a one-size-fits-all formula for helping to mitigate experiences of impostor phenomenon. The strategies that are effective will depend on for whom and under what circumstances the kind of impostor phenomenon that a student is experiencing. And so we’re really excited about really diving into the complexity of this phenomenon, of this construct.

Rebecca: We look forward to hearing where the research leads and your findings.

John: Thank you for joining us. This is an issue that clearly is affecting a lot of people. So getting more information out to other educators, I think, is going to be helpful.

Sara: I’m really grateful that you invited me to participate in this podcast. As I mentioned, I did some cognitive reframing for myself in preparation for this interview. And for me, one of the helpful thoughts and strategies was to just acknowledge that even if there’s some information that I really would like to cover that I forget, let’s say, or like, even if I’m not quite as comprehensive in addressing all of the relevant points that I would be really excited to share with you, that increasing awareness at any level is meaningful with respect to academic impostor phenomenon, because almost all of us experience it, and unfortunately, many of us experience it in isolation. So the more aware we are of the shared experience of self doubt, even in the face of high levels of achievement, I think the better equipped we’ll be to navigate our own educational and professional journeys in an informed way, in a way that will help us to maximize our true potential and pursue our passion and interest. I just really appreciate an opportunity to share some of this information, to have this dialog and this discussion. It really is my passion, in particular, to support students and to support psych majors in STEM related courses. So, thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you so much.

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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 Fred Llerena.

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420. Teaching from the Same Side

Posted in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, engagement, evidence-based practices, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, retrieval practice, scholarship of teaching and learning, spaced practice, teaching, Uncategorized
November 19, 2025

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

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.

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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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415. One Classroom at a Time

Posted in accessibility, assessment, authentic learning, diversity, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, retrieval practice, teaching
October 15, 2025

Students have varied levels of preparation for traditional types of classes and assessments used in colleges. In this episode, David Gooblar joins us to discuss a variety of instructional strategies that we can adopt to help all students succeed.

David is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the creator of Pedagogy Unbound, and the author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. His most recent book, One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable, was released in August 2025 by Harvard University Press.

Show Notes

  • Gooblar, D. (2025). One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable. Harvard University Press.
  • Gooblar, D. (2019). The missing course: Everything they never taught you about college teaching. Harvard University Press.
  • Cohen, G. L., Steele, C. M., & Ross, L. D. (1999). The mentor’s dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 25(10), 1302-1318.
  • Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., … & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 804.
  • Canning, E. A., White, M., & Davis, W. B. (2024). Growth mindset messages from instructors improve academic performance among first-generation college students. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 23(2), ar14.
  • Elizabeth Canning (2021). Faculty Mindset. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 212. November 3.

Transcript

John: Students have varied levels of preparation for traditional types of classes and assessments used in colleges. In this episode, we explore a variety of instructional strategies that we can adopt to help all students succeed.

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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 David Gooblar. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the creator of Pedagogy Unbound, and the author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. His most recent book, One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable, was released in August 2025 by Harvard University Press. Welcome back, David.

David: Thank you so much. I’m very excited to talk with you today.

John: We’re very happy to be able to talk with you again. Our teas today are:… David, are you drinking any tea?

David: I am. I’m drinking an I love lemon.

Rebecca: I have a Jasmine green today,

John: And I have a tea in my pocket, but because my meeting ran late, I am drinking diet Pepsi.

Rebecca: Oh, John. [LAUGHTER]

John: I think it’s only the second time in the podcast I haven’t been drinking tea, so

David: I won’t take it personally. [LAUGHTER]

John: I have it here. In fact, it was a tea that was given to us by one of our listeners in France, but I’ll save that for next time. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So we invited you here today to discuss one classroom at a time. Can you tell us the origin story of the book?

David: Sure, back in probably 2019 I was working for the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Temple University. And as part of that job, I was doing a lot of reading of pedagogy research, and I was, of course, coming across a lot of research on ways to close achievement gaps within the college classroom. There was a lot of work being done on how to help marginalized students succeed. And it struck me as I was reading all this that I wasn’t seeing this sort of knowledge base being applied in the work of DEI offices across the country. It was a kind of high time for DEI offices. There was a lot of action, particularly starting in 2020. Universities, responding to Black Lives Matter and responding to a lot of activism, looking to reform universities, and so DEI offices were doing a lot to try to change the cultures within their institutions. What I wasn’t seeing was DEI offices doing really anything to change how professors teach. And that sort of contrast, looking at this sort of growing base of knowledge that the way that we teach can actually change student outcomes versus the part of our universities sort of devoted to remedying the inequities in student outcomes, sort of ignoring that. That was the kind of conundrum that started my research and really got me thinking about how can I close this gap, how can I communicate with the people who need to hear what they can do to help their marginalized students succeed?

John: Colleges have done a lot to recruit a more diverse student base, and we know that education can be a really effective way of escaping from poverty, but has that been as successful for the marginalized students that you’ve mentioned as it had been for earlier cohorts of students?

David: Absolutely not, no. So we still have really striking gaps, certainly the sort of more famous gaps that we know are between white students and black and brown students, where the gaps in graduation rate are essentially stagnant for the past 30 years, but similarly stubborn gaps exist between well off students and economically insecure students. If you look at students from the top family income quartile, 69% of them graduate within six years. That number for the lowest quartile is 26%. First-gen students are twice as likely to drop out within the first three years as their continuing generation peers. These are things that we know about, but there’s also a lot of research that suggests, not only are we not closing these gaps, we may be making them worse, which is kind of shocking to think about, but there are studies that look at the performance of marginalized students and control for pre-college characteristics like high school quality or pre-college academic performance, and find that they say low-income students still perform worse than you would expect and perform worse than their more well off peers. So I still think there’s lots that we can do, and it’s not for lack of trying, but it is, I think, lack of trying to influence what happens in classrooms.

Rebecca: So you talk a little bit about marginalized students entering into college, and we also know that a lot of these students have a lot of social inequities that impact them before they arrive at our institutions. The focus of your book, though, is, of course, on what happens in the classroom. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to focus on in the classroom instead of what happens before?

David: Yeah, so part of that is that point that I just made, that I do think that there are things that a lot of colleges are doing that are actually making inequities worse, but the main reason is that in my work, I write to faculty members, I write to professors, and so my focus is really trying to be practical. What can we do? It would not make sense for me to advise professors to put their focus on housing policy or put their focus on ending racism. We know that most of the inequality that we confront in our classrooms comes from far afield of our classrooms, that our students are coming to us from really disparate backgrounds. They have all sorts of things going on in their lives, and most of the causes of the inequality that we see we can’t do anything about. And so that’s really dispiriting. So I wanted to sort of look at, well, what can we do? What are the things that we can change in how we teach that might actually change the trajectory of our students? I do think that most professors are hoping to transform their students’ lives, even if that’s a sort of modest transformation, of transforming the way they see their subject, or something more capacious, of transforming the course of their lives. I do think that we’re hoping to change our students for the better, and so thinking of, well, we can’t get to the root of these problems, but there are things that we can do. I think that really helped me sort of focus on what to write about and what to promote in the book.

Rebecca: I know it can be really frustrating to faculty to always talk at a higher level of like, what are all the underlying causes, but having something actionable [LAUGHTER] is really helpful.

David: Exactly.

John: And when we have students in our classroom, we have to deal with the students we have. We can’t go back and undo their past experiences with education and inequality and so forth. So we don’t want to ignore the students that we’re currently dealing with. And in the first chapter of your book, you call it imaginary students and imaginary classrooms. What are some of the ways in which faculty preconceptions differ from the reality they experience in classrooms, and what causes this disconnect between faculty expectations and the actual reality they’re working with

David: The broad strokes of the imaginary students problem, as I think of it, is that most of us imagine our students to be more privileged than they are. That’s the sort of broad thing. There’s lots of specifics into that, but generally, our students are worse off economically, aren’t as white as we think they are, or will be before we meet them, have all sorts of aspects of their identity that make their path through life trickier than what we imagine they’ll be. There’s lots of reasons for this. One of the sort of more, I think, persuasive things that I came across in trying to figure out why we have this kind of disconnect is the idea that within the sort of hierarchy of universities and what we think of as university quality, but maybe we should better think of it as university prestige. Almost every professor in this country teaches at an institution lower on the totem pole than where they were trained. It’s the nature of our industry that you get a PhD, and then you end up getting a job, usually somewhere with less prestige than your graduate institution. Only a small proportion of American colleges and universities offer doctorates. This is one part of it. What this means is that to the extent that professors are trained how to teach, they’re trained on a more privileged sub-population of college students than the ones they actually teach. So that’s one big issue. Another big issue is that for the most part, we don’t train professors to teach. This was, of course, the subject of my last book, The Missing Course. And so what this means, practically, is that I teach very much like my professors taught, because I learned by watching them, and they, of course, teach by the way their professors taught, but my professors taught a student body that was far more privileged than our student body. Now I think it’s easy to forget the sort of diversification of the American higher education system is actually a really recent phenomenon, as late as 1990, which…I don’t know about you, but I remember 1990… 8 out of 10 American college students were white. Right now, that’s 55% and dropping. And so the sort of our sense of what a college student is and what a college student can do is sort of based on an earlier version of who college students were. And so this comes out in all sorts of ways. One of the sort of more visible ways that we see this disconnect is in the amount of time we expect students to be able to put to our classes. And I can sort of feel every faculty member that’s listening to this nod about this. Because everyone is concerned about students not reading as much, not devoting as much time to their studies as possible. My students work 20, 30, sometimes 40 hours a week on top of being full-time students. An astonishing number of my students take seven courses a semester. Many of them have family members they take care of, many of them actually volunteer. They’re very, very busy. And when we have surveys of how students spend their time, typically, although we expect them to spend two hours outside of class for every one credit hour in class, the surveys suggest that it’s about half that that students spend, on average, about one hour outside of class doing schoolwork for every credit hour they take. Now I’m not suggesting that we lower our standards or even that we assign less work, but we’re not going to help our students succeed if we don’t acknowledge the reality that they don’t look like what we expect them to. So that’s one of the more visible ways that our students are kind of having more difficult lives, to put it bluntly, than what we may expect them to have.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about or maybe provide an example of a way that a faculty member can support students that have all these tugs on their time and attention?

David: Yeah, well, a couple of things. The first thing that I always try to do is acknowledge it. I do think that we can actually achieve a lot by letting students know that we understand that we are one important thing among many in their lives, and if we don’t treat them like our thing is the most important thing, and they have nothing else weighing on their time, we can sort of get to a better level of communication with them, where I can make the case to them that doing work for my class is going to be valuable to them. So that’s the sort of the case, or the psychological approach you can take. The other thing that I think is, like the easiest thing to do, it’s not that easy, is really focus on taking advantage of class time. Like, I don’t know what many of my students do outside of the classroom. That is their lives. That is their time. And they may have quite different and unequal circumstances affecting the amount of time and attention they can give to the work that I want them to do. I do know that they have to come to class, and so this isn’t me saying get rid of homework, but I’m much more aware of using class time to have students do the work that I want them to do. I no longer think it’s a responsible thing to just lecture at students and give them information. I want to take advantage of them being together, of being in a social environment where they can do work with my guidance and with the feedback of myself and their peers. So that’s one thing that I really think about when thinking about the inequalities of time and attention that we see.

John: Marginalized students often experience some degree of imposter syndrome or stereotype threat. What are some strategies we can do to break that down to create a better sense of belonging for all of our students?

David: Sure, this is one of the most well established psychological barriers that anyone that faces in academic domains, stereotype threat, the sort of concern that you may be the target of a negative stereotype, consumes part of the brain and takes away cognitive resources from the important intellectual work we hope students will do. So, one of the sort of most effective broad strategies we can put into place to combat stereotype threat is inviting students to share a broader part of their lives in our classes. One of the things that we know is that students who suffer from or who are targets of stereotypes around academic performances, those stereotypes can be mitigated if students feel that they’re not just their academic selves in the class. If students are reminded that they are not just students, but sisters and brothers and children of parents, that they are friends, that they are soccer players, that they are interested in crocheting, whatever it is, they’ll have a broader base of self integrity, of self confidence to fend off stereotypes. It’s not that they’re going to stop understanding that they might be stereotyped. It’s going to have less power because they’re not just going to see themselves as students within their classes. And a lot of how students see themselves within our classes is based on how they think we see them. So if they believe that we as professors see them as more than just their academic performance, they’ll be more likely to have that broad base to work from. So part of that is conveying an understanding that students have a lot going on in their lives, but also there’s lots of little things you can do to invite students to share parts of their lives in class. I do this thing that I know a lot of professors do, that I call question roll, where to start the class. I always ask students a question, and everyone has to answer it. And for me, this question almost always has nothing to do with what we’re going to talk about in class, and it is a no stakes, no wrong answers. Type of question I’ll ask, what’s the first thing you wanted to be when you grew up as a kid? What’s the best thing to eat for lunch in Iowa City? What’s the best fruit? There’s a lot of food related ones, but it’s a way to ease students into class, get them talking before there’s any stakes, but also, in a kind of subtle way, it allows them to share who they are, without them even sort of realizing that that’s what they’re doing. And what I’ll find is that I start every class with this, and that if I ever forget to do it, my students are completely up in arms and like they cannot imagine starting class without doing question roll if I didn’t ask my question. So they really get into it, even though at the beginning of the semester, they’ll think it’s silly and they’ll resist answering questions. It kind of lays down that precedent that in this class, yes, we’re going to do hard work. Yes, we’re going to try to understand difficult concepts, but we’re all people coming from various places and that we’re going to have a more successful time if we don’t deny those parts of ourselves. So I really sort of believe in this sort of broad strategy of trying to invite students in, invite more parts of students. That, to me, is the kind of subtle thing, or a broad thing that can show itself in lots of different ways throughout a semester, but I do think that if we can think about part of our job as inviting students to share parts of their selves that may not be obvious to them as relevant to their academic selves, that we can really help to mitigate stereotype threat for them.

Rebecca: One of the things that we’ve talked about on many episodes of Tea for Teaching is growth mindset, and that’s something that I know you cover in your book as well. Can you discuss some strategies that help nurture a growth mindset in our students?

David: Sure, one of the more interesting things I learned in doing the work for this book, I of course, had read a lot about growth mindset, and I’m a parent, so I understand all the research into the encouragement of a growth mindset in individuals, but one of the things that I saw is that a lot of the big studies that look at the effects of promoting a growth mindset in the students, the results aren’t as good when the environment students are in work against the growth mindset. So when their peers have a fixed mindset, and/or when there’s a school culture that has a fixed mindset, any promotion of a growth mindset within an individual is kind of blunted, which makes a lot of sense to me. And so what I hope to do in the chapter I have on growth mindset is move away from the idea of growth mindset as sort of teaching students that their brain is a muscle. I think there’s a kind of limitation to sort of telling students to have a growth mindset, and we should focus more on the signals we send to students about the environment of our classrooms. That much more important is looking closely at the way that we do things in our courses and asking ourselves, “Is this focused on student growth, or is this focused on sorting out the better students from the worst students?” So I think about how we talk to students in our syllabi, how we literally talk to students in classes. Are we focused on persuading them that we’re working for them, that the course is designed to help them grow, rather than persuading them the course is going to root out the people who don’t have it, or look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here, or even sort of the purposes of assessment. If we can explain to students that assessment is really important for teachers to understand how students are doing so that we can help them better. Students generally assume, and a lot of professors talk about it like this, that assessment is to sort out whether they know it or not, to give them a grade. And of course, that’s part of what we do, but to me, that takes a back seat to the formative aspect of assessment. The main purpose of assessment, for me, is to see how students are doing, because I want to help them get better. So those kind of more sort of environmental aspects of a class, I think, make a bigger difference in promoting growth mindset than talking about it directly and promoting it to students a sort of individual version of that, one of the sort of strategies that I think goes along with this idea of a growth mindset culture, is something called wise feedback. Came from research by Jeffrey Cohen and his colleagues that looks at particularly how we give feedback to students on their work. They looked at student writing, but I think it can be for any kind of student work. And essentially, wise feedback has three aspects, where you start by invoking high standards. You sort of say, I’m giving you this feedback because I have very high standards for you, either because of this class is really difficult and hard and I’m trying to bring you to a high level, or because I believe that you’re capable of meeting these things, following that invocation of high standards always has to be encouragement. So I’m giving this feedback because I have very high standards, and I know that you can get there, that you can work on it, and then you sort of fill out that encouragement, or you prove that encouragement by giving specific guidance as to what students can do. So most of us, I worry, have been sort of taught by experience and trained to give feedback to justify our grade. I think of particularly the early career instructors I work with, who are very concerned with, for good reason, being challenged about grades, and so their feedback they give to students on paper, essentially, is, here’s why I’m giving you the B minus. Instead, if we think about this kind of growth mindset approach to feedback, here’s where I think you can get, here’s why I believe you can do it, here’s how you can get there. I think that’s a much more effective way to get feedback, where you’re actually teaching through your feedback.

John: You just noted that one of the issues is that it’s not just something you can do in your class with students or encourage them to have a growth mindset if that’s not what they’re observing, and one of the studies you cite is a study done by Elizabeth Canning and colleagues, who looked at the impact of faculty mindset on student learning outcomes. Could you talk a little bit about that study?

David: An amazing study they looked at science professors at a big midwest University, and I think they surveyed all these faculty members about their mindsets, not their students mindsets, but the faculty members mindsets. And they found that the faculty members with a fixed mindset had much larger achievement gaps in their classes than the faculty mindsets with a growth mindset. This was independent of faculty identity, by the way. So this was even the case for faculty with marginalized identities themselves. So it seems that, at least as I interpret it, that our students are taking cues from us a lot of the time about what’s expected of them and what the course is about. And so if we have a growth mindset, if we come at the world with a sort of theory of mind that people can improve, that people can get better with practice. Our students will notice that, and they’ll take what we tell them in a constructive way, in a way that they’ll actually work at something. If they suspect from the way we talk, from the way we carry ourselves, from the way we structure our courses, that we actually have a fixed mindset, that we believe that generally talent is doled out somewhere, and either you have it or you don’t, they’ll get the message that when they struggle early on in a semester, that there’s essentially not much they can do. And so I do think it really matters how we talk about our subjects, classes, how we talk about our disciplines, how we talk about what student work is for. There’s been really interesting research done on the concept of brilliance, and certain disciplines value brilliance in their fields. Philosophy is one that comes to mind a lot, that if you survey faculty members about what it takes to succeed in this field, philosophy and some other fields, for sure, rank being brilliant really high. You need to really be smart to do well in this class. Well, research has shown that those disciplines that value brilliance most highly have the biggest gaps between privileged students and marginalized students in their fields; they have the fewest black PhDs, for example, the fewest women PhDs. And so how we think about what it takes to succeed in our field really matters to students, and whether we tell them it explicitly or not, it comes across to them.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked about a few different challenges related to inequity that our students face, and your book explores many others. Can you talk about a few more examples of strategies that can be used to promote more equity and student success?

David: One of the sort of best supported strategies for what certainly used to be called inclusive teaching, I don’t know if people still use that phrase, is structure. There were a couple of really huge, really sort of ironclad surveys about the inclusion of structure into large lecture classes, and how that helped to narrow gaps that were really, really stubborn, and nobody seems to know what structure is, so I’ll explain it a little bit. Structure in the context of educational research is really just having students do stuff. It’s the opposite of a lecture, where all students have to do is sit and listen to a lecture. Structure is where you make students answer questions before the lecture, where you put them in groups and talk about the concept, where you do a survey in class and have students respond to it, where you have students do writing in class. It’s structuring class time so that students have things to do for their learning. And so we know that that is really effective, particularly for marginalized students. One of the reasons why this helps is because privileged students need less from us than marginalized students. One thing that privileged students have that marginalized students don’t have is a positive experience with school. They like school much more than marginalized students do. They’ve had a good experience. They know how to be good students… I’m speaking very broadly, of course… but on the whole, and they have more resources to help them with that. And so a class period where all students have to do is sit and take notes and do the work themselves, is going to favor those students who are good at being students, and it’s going to disadvantage those students who have had a less positive experience with school, who have fewer resources to help them out, with less time to do the work. So the more that we can structure class time is what I was talking about, taking advantage of class time, the more that we can help those students. I’ve also sort of been convinced that the best kind of structure is transparent and predictable. Transparency really helps students for lots of reasons. I think part of it is that growth mindset piece, that if we explain to students why we’re doing what we’re doing, we will most likely persuade them that what we’re doing is to help them learn, which we can’t take for granted that they believe. And the predictability piece, I think, is really interesting. There’s been really, I think, provocative and powerful research done on the value of taking high-stakes exams, and instead of giving, say, two or three exams over the course of semester, dividing up the points you’d give to that and giving students weekly exams, weekly quizzes, and where you ask about the same material, you just do it more often. This strategy seems to really help economically insecure students, and there’s some sort of disagreement as to why this helps, but one of the reasons why I think it helps is that economically insecure students are used to and good at focusing on pressing concerns. We know a lot about how economically insecure students struggle with long-term planning. What they’re good at is short-term planning. Living in near poverty means that you have to focus on pressing needs, because it’s a life of instability and scarcity. And so if the task is study for this quiz on Thursday rather than study for an exam next month, we’re going to help those students who have fewer resources to do that kind of long-term planning, the long term thinking that is involved in preparing for a midterm or an exam in a month or two. So thinking of our structure as, yes, having students do stuff, but wherever possible, make it transparent, so that students always know why we’re asking them to do the work we’re asking them to do, and if possible, predictable, so students can sort of count on our classes as being a reliable source of support and help in a world that is less than reliable for them.

John: So one of the things your book addresses that’s often ignored in many books about effective teaching is a focus on student disability. Can you talk a little bit about this chapter and some recommendations on what institutions and what faculty can do to help create a more supportive environment for students with disabilities?

David: It’s one of my favorite parts of the book, partly because I learned a lot, and so we know that disabled students struggle in our institutions, that they graduate at a much lower rate than their able bodied peers, and that the numbers we do have about their success are probably under selling the problem, because something close to a half to 1/3 of students with disabilities actually report their disability to their institution. So we know that plenty of students, even plenty of students who get institutional support in high school, aren’t telling their institutions in college, and so aren’t getting the support they need, and aren’t getting recorded in these studies. What I did in the course of my research was I kind of looked at the history of disabled students in the academy, and I found, probably unsurprisingly, that the Academy had to be sort of dragged kicking and screaming to care of and educate disabled students. It was only by force of law in the 1970s that American institutions of higher education began admitting disabled students in large numbers and admitting them into mainstream classrooms. But going over that history, which was of course, also the history of the creation of Student Disability Services offices and the accommodation system really made me think of how we take for granted this system that we really shouldn’t accept as being the way things should be. Essentially American colleges and universities were told that there was this new population of students with different needs coming into the academy, and that they had a mandate to give them as good an education as everybody else, and that was an opportunity to tell professors in particular, look, you’re going to get a lot of new students with different needs. Maybe you should change the way you teach. Maybe you should change the way that you approach your students, because your students are going to have some different needs. We didn’t do that. We didn’t do that at all. We didn’t touch the center of our institutions at all, in terms of what I think of as the center of our institutions, our classrooms. Instead, we created an office on the margins of our institutions, and a system that too often allows professors to change very little about how they teach. In fact, seems designed to allow you and I to change very little about how we teach, and even if we look at the language that universities use around accommodations, it very much is about students have a right to an accommodation, but only if it doesn’t interrupt the educational standards, are very often the way they’re phrased, and I just don’t understand what educational standards could be if they’re not helping all of our students learn. And so this idea that we can help certain students, but only if it doesn’t interfere with some vague sense of standard that is unconnected with helping our students that I just don’t understand. And so I really want faculty members to sort of rethink how they approach a class before they meet their students. We very often think of our disabled students as an exception, as something that comes after the fact. We meet our students, we tell them the syllabus, we tell them the way it’s going to be, and then you start to meet some disabled students who say, by the way, I have an accommodation request, and you make an exception for them. So I’m very much drawn to, of course, Universal Design for Learning, which is, of course, a long time, broad approach to teaching, it comes from many disability activists, that seeks to, before we meet our students, design our classes so they’ll work for everybody. This is an ideal. It’s not easy to do, but it’s the right approach, rather than pretending that all of our students are able bodied and then being surprised every time that we get X number of disabled students asking for a change. So I go into a lot more detail in the book, but that’s one of the reasons why I love writing despite how much I hate writing, is that sometimes you can learn something. Is that actually doing this research really opened my eyes to kind of what we take for granted about the place of disabled students on campus and how the system seems set up to cast them as exceptions. In my opinion, that underlies a lot of their struggles to succeed.

Rebecca: It’ll be interesting to see how the updated regulations to Title II of the ADA, which addresses public institutions, helps move this work along, because it does require this proactive approach around access, especially around digital technology.

David: Yeah, I don’t have high hopes, but I do have hopes.

Rebecca: So we focus a lot on in-person classes. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship of the contents of your book to online classes.

David: The reason why I mostly address in-person classes is because that’s most of my experience. I am skeptical of a lot of online education. I know that there’s a lot of people who’ve done really great work, and there’s a sense in which sometimes that online educators have had to focus on some of these issues before people in person have had to, particularly around generating good community, where you sort of have to work harder. I do hope that all the principles that I advance will work in sort of any classroom. I just think that we do faculty and students a disservice if we pretend that online education isn’t harder. I think it’s harder. I do think that we are doing people work, care work, and that good teaching has to do with forming relationships with our students and helping them as human beings. I used to have this joke when I worked for a teaching center when people would come in for advice about their teaching. I’d say half jokingly, all right, I want you to imagine that this is your student, and you’re their teacher, and you’re trying to help them. I do think that sometimes we sort of get away from the idea that these are people that we have relationships with, they’re professional relationships, they’re educational relationships, they’re relationships. I think that that relationship is harder to see in an online environment, at least it is for me, and so it takes more work to nurture and make work. It certainly can work, but it’s harder.

Rebecca: Challenging, both for the students and for the faculty. [LAUGHTER] It goes both ways.

John: We always end with the question: what’s next?

David: Well, what’s next for me is, I’ve just been recently made Director of Programming at Iowa called Gen Ed. Lit is what we call ti, general education literature. It’s a class offered by the English department that every undergrad at Iowa, except for English majors, has to take. So about 3000 students every year take it, 150 sections, something like 60 or 70 instructors. Most of them are graduate instructors, and my role is I oversee this course, and I’m a supervisor of all of these instructors. So I took the position because I’m really passionate about training new instructors and helping people learn how to teach better. And so for me, it’s an opportunity to put a lot of the ideas that I’ve been thinking about and writing about for years into practice with people who are actually on the front lines, which is a terrible metaphor, but I’ll use it anyway. But teaching our undergrads, and in particular in this course, teaching students who, for the most part, haven’t chosen to be in the class, which is, as you know, one of the more challenging teaching challenges that we face. And so I’m really excited about helping new instructors find their feet and helping figure out, particularly at this time, where everyone is worried about AI, helping to figure out how to teach literary reading skills to a generation that I think could really benefit from developing them.

John: And a generation that spends much less time reading than prior generations. So it’s a nice challenge to be addressing and working on it, and I hope it’s successful, and maybe, if so, you can share that more broadly so we can all improve this.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely sounds like a challenge that might keep you busy for a little bit anyway. [LAUGHTER] Well, thanks again for joining us and sharing your work.

David: Well, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much for the work that you do and for talking with me today.

John: Thank you. We’re looking forward to future conversations with 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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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389. Inclusive Math Instruction

Posted in access, classroom community, diversity, engagement, equity, first-generation, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, learning, math ed, pedagogy, race, reflective practice, STEM education, teaching, Uncategorized
April 16, 2025

Undergraduate math courses, as traditionally taught, often serve as barriers to entry into many STEM disciplines. In this episode, Aris Winger joins us to discuss strategies that can increase student success and reduce equity gaps in student outcomes in these classes.

Aris is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Gwinnett College. His current areas of interest include equity in mathematics education, culturally responsive teaching, and social justice mathematics. He is a co-author of the book series Advocating for Students of Color in Mathematics and is the Executive Director of the National Association of Mathematicians.

Transcript

John: Undergraduate math courses, as traditionally taught, often serve as barriers to entry into many STEM disciplines. In this episode, we explore strategies that can increase student success and reduce equity gaps in student outcomes in these classes.

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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 Aris Winger. Aris is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Gwinnett College. His current areas of interest include equity in mathematics education, culturally responsive teaching, and social justice mathematics. He is a co-author of the book series Advocating for Students of Color in Mathematics and is the Executive Director of the National Association of Mathematicians. Welcome Aris.

Aris: Thank you for having me.

John: It’s great to see you again. You were here not too long ago to do some workshops on our campus. Today’s teas are:… Aris, are you drinking any tea?

Aris: Oh, I am not drinking tea. I’m drinking water. Yeah, my family is a big tea drinking family, but I’m just a water drinker.

Rebecca: That’s okay, water is the foundation of tea.

Aris: Yeah, that’s right. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I’m drinking Blue Sapphire today, John.

John: Back to an old favorite.

Rebecca: It is, yeah.

John: And I am drinking Lady Grey.

Rebecca: Oh, nice, I had that not too long ago.

Aris: Excellent.

Rebecca: So in most colleges and universities, passing rates in math classes are lower than most other disciplines, and we’ve invited you here today to discuss strategies that would allow more students to be successful in the study of math. First, though, can you tell us a little bit about your own educational journey?

Aris: So yes, I was valued in math from my earliest mathematical memory, and so my earliest mathematical memory was with my mother, who was showing me the future. I remember going up to her and, like, “Mom, look, two plus three is five.” She was like, “soon you’ll notice that two and she put an x 3 is six.” I was like, “What’s that?” She’s like, “You’ll see.” And then from there, like, early on, I was doing two-digit multiplications faster than other people. And then the teachers around me were like, “Oh, you’re good, you’re fast, you can do this.” And so I say, “Oh, I guess I can.” And so I started to develop sort of a math identity. That is to say that it became part of me to be, quote, good at math. And I kept that for a long time. And when life got rough for me, when I was younger, I could always go to math and be safe at math, because I felt an identity. I felt good there, I felt valuable in mathematics. And so it just became a deep part of my identity. So that meant that I was going to major in math. That meant that I was going to be a mathematics professor the whole nine. So I continue to go back and look at that story to see my through line. And I’ve had to change the story, by the way. It used to be, in this journey that I’ve had, I’ve had to change the story also, because the story used to be, “Oh, I’m just smarter than other people,” when, in fact, the story really was that I’ve been trained. And really making this understanding that not that drinking the Kool Aid, that somehow I’m ordained to have a mathematical brain, I’ve been trained, and I deserve to say that I was trained, because I put in a lot of work. And so if a surgeon can say they were trained, a mathematician can say that they were trained also, and so for 10 years, from 1995 to 2005 I got a bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in mathematics. That 10 years was training.

John: A very large share of students that we see in college say “I’ve never been good at math”. Why do so many students come in struggling with math or believing that they’re not capable of being successful in math?

Aris: Yeah, well, it’s because they’ve had mathematical experiences that weren’t optimal for them. And so there’s a narrative that I want to interrogate, and I’m thankful for this opportunity to speak out, an interrogation of a narrative that we have to call into question. And so it is this notion that somehow math has done something to us and math has done nothing to us. So when someone says that they hate math, they’re not talking about the body of knowledge that’s the greatest body of knowledge in history of the human experience. They’re not talking about that. They’re talking about a human relational experience they’ve had in the culture of mathematics that humans have built about how we do math, particularly in the western context. And so whenever someone today says, “Oh, I hate math,” then I just say, lots of my colleagues say, “Oh, I’m sorry that happened to you.” I just say, “Who was it? What grade? Tell me what happened.” And then often they will say, “Oh, it’s this person, here’s what they said to me,” or “here’s why I didn’t like this class.” Lots of times they also say it was when the letter showed up. And so for me, what helps me is that I try to return to the innocence of the person that is talking to me. So when someone says that, I’m thinking about a kid sitting in the chair and then all of a sudden, they’ve been doing percentages, they’ve been doing proportions, and then all of a sudden someone writes an X up on the board and says, I want to know what X is. And for some reason, it blows this person away, like I have no idea what’s going on. And that person starts to, maybe for the first time, feel unsure, feel like they don’t belong. Now, there are all these feelings that are showing up that never got attended to. And we know in this discipline, the way that it is taught, that that cascades, because then this builds on the next thing, which builds on the next thing, and then all of a sudden you find yourself, “Whoa, I gotta get out of this thing.” Now, the tragedy that we have in our society is that we have lots and lots of our young people who are getting out of the discipline of mathematics, and it’s the most important, [LAUGHTER] right? And so that’s the tragedy, that’s the crisis, that we have so many people leaving our discipline. And so I want to be clear, that doesn’t mean that everyone needs to be a math major. That means that the world that I dream of is one in which we’re all connected and thriving quantitatively. What does that mean? That means that we are allowing ourselves, or we have the permission, to ask quantitative questions like, “Why does that cost that much?” and “is that the right percentage rate for my mortgage?” and “why don’t I want that payday loan?” Right now we have so many silent people quantitatively, because the predominant space in which we think quantitatively is in school, and so in school, school mathematics, systematically, is about some other narratives that we continue to uphold, like speed and correctness, and it doesn’t allow for the imagination to grow. So the answer to your question is that these experiences, when we see the people today in our colleges, they are, in terms of math, they are an extension of a past experience that is over a decade long. And so I want to return all of our kids back to that, in a sense, to “Wait, you know, you’ve had a math experience that has been difficult.” And for me, one of my goals is to create a new narrative for those people who come into my class, and not just for them. And so if I can get a young person or old person, whoever’s in my class, to think differently about math, then maybe they get their cousin to think differently about math and their little sister. And because, again, you never know who’s watching and who’s going to see how you interact and how that impacts them.

Rebecca: You’ve talked about our individual experiences with math and how much they vary, and they vary across elementary and secondary school districts as well. What can college math instructors do to help address these inequities in prior knowledge?

Aris: The first thing I would think of is that each college instructor needs to look at each of their people as an individual. And so for me, for so long, I would go to my pre-calculus class or college algebra and say, “Okay, I’m teaching that group,” and that was 11 years ago. And today I go in and I’m saying, “Oh, I’ve got Sammy, I’ve got Mark, I’ve got Jamal, I’ve got Lisa, I’ve got Tiana, right? I’ve got this group of people, and I’m teaching this subject today. Given who I have in my class, what should I be doing today? And how should I do it today?” And so there is a returning, or perhaps introducing, for the first time, a humanity of the people who are in my class. And so that’s the first thing. Just acknowledge that you’re teaching a group of human individuals Now, from there, there’s an acknowledgement that you yourself come from a culture, come from an experience, and that that’s going to impact the way that you teach. And so then, now, at this point, how is it that we can develop a good relationship between yourself and the people who you’re going to be engaging with for the next 14, 15, 16, weeks in this discipline, and then thinking about also this balance between your relationship with those people and the content, and which one comes first. And so for so long, it’s like, “Oh, I gotta get through this. I gotta get through this. I gotta get through this topic, this topic, this topic, this topic.” And the thing that keeps me up at night is that, in our discipline, there’s a crucial question that’s lacking in our discipline still, and it is the question I think we have to ask ourselves, is, “How do my students feel?” Somehow, the question of how my students feel when I give back assignment and it’s marked up with red, or if Pearson MyMathLab says that, “No, that’s incorrect,” and they’ve been working on it, or if they’re in ALEKS and they’ve been working on a topic for 35 minutes, and ALEKS says, “You know what, I think you should move on.” How that makes them feel? Or maybe a policy that I have of no late homework, even though they have two jobs, all of that. How is it that what I do in a space where I have all the control, how does it make my students feel? And then to rectify that with how I want them to feel learning the greatest discipline in the history. Now we know how I want them to feel. I want them to feel curious. I want them to feel empowered. I hold knowledge that I’m trying to convey and explore, for them to be super powerful, super engaged and literate quantitatively. And so I want all these positive emotions, and yet all these negative emotions are happening. And so part of my job as a professional, I see, is to try and ease that tension, to have them try and learn it, but also for them to feel joy, to feel curiosity, to feel great about themselves, right? And so I was at the joint math meetings, and I was giving a talk, and at the end, I was talking about feedback forms, that you’ve got to get feedback from your students in order to understand what’s going on with them, because you don’t understand what’s going down, that was the bold claim I was making as a teacher. A person in the audience at the end said “I wanted to push back.” Now I love pushback, because lots of great things come out of pushback, just like I want to push back. And I was like, “Okay, great.” And then he says, well, sometimes you shouldn’t listen to their feedback, because I had a student, and we were in class, it was a class of five, and we went through the whole semester, and I could tell they hated the entire experience, but then they came up to me a semester after this semester, came up to me and said, “I hated every moment of your class, but I learned all the material.” And then he said, “that’s the reason why we should ignore our students’ feedback.” And then I responded to him. But then afterwards, after the talk was over, I went out, and he pulled me aside. It’s like, “See I did my job.” And I said, “But wait, so this person got all the content from you, but this person hated every moment in this class, and you think you did your job,” and to anybody who’s listening, that if students got all the content but hated every moment of it, then we haven’t done our job. And that, I want to imagine us doing mathematics and them getting content in connection to the greatest discipline and being who they are, loving every moment. And that’s the dream, and that’s hard, because when you get back a C minus, how can we have someone have joy and get a C minus? And these are hard questions. I don’t claim to have the answers to these, but again, this is tension, but we have to continue to dream, because we have in our hands, we have in our expertise, this great discipline that we have to continue to pass on to people, but pass on to people in joyous ways.

John: Given the diversity in what students come into our class knowing, though, it’s hard to come up with a method of instruction that provides sufficient support for all students while still helping them learn more. How can you build that…

Aris: No, no, what you just said is false. Now, it might be true that we have not been able to do it yet. So what you just said, I respectfully disagree. I think that what you said is true if we continue to do what we’ve been doing, there’s no doubt about that. And so that’s what I mean about dreaming. And so I’ve come on to this podcast to dream with you. And so when you dream, you can’t say stuff like that, because then there’s no openness to be like, “Okay, wait, how can we do something else?” I agree with you that if we keep doing what we’re doing, then… and so let’s unpack that. That means that I go in front of somebody, I go in front of a class, and this happens to all of us. It’s a great problem. You go in front of the class and mathematics, the way it is built now, says that, “Oh, you must have prerequisite knowledge.” And so that means that we think of math in school as a body of knowledge, more than a natural human activity. And this tension, we have to make sure we elucidate and make clear that we can think of math as a body of knowledge, or we can think of it as a place where people get to play. Now, in one of those with the natural human activity, everybody just needs to come, explore, think about mathematic questions. This is the math circles space where you just play. You make it an introductory question, and it’s set up so that there are multiple entry points, and you just go after it, and then you have someone who’s facilitating, who’s valuing every single contribution. Notice I didn’t say answer, every single contribution. Or you can think of our discipline as this compendium of knowledge, where, over the last, however, many centuries since the dawn of humanity, we’ve been collecting all of these mathematical facts into one big thing that, again, is the biggest dossier of human knowledge that humans have. But if you think about it that way, exclusively, then when you come into pre-calculus, then when I look at you, then I’m thinking, “Do you know enough college algebra?” And if I do that, then I’m being exclusionary from the jump. The first day of class, we’re being exclusionary subconsciously, to all of our students, to some of them, right?

John: You interrupted me in the middle of the question. The next part I was going to ask, I think, would get to the points that you’re making, that we want all of our students to be successful in developing their knowledge, but given their differences in backgrounds, what are some strategies we can use, perhaps to leverage peers in class, or in other ways, to help provide that sort of support for all of our students, no matter where their starting point is?

Aris: I think that’s a great question, and it’s true that given if–then statement, if the if I call in the question, I will not hear the then. So yeah, that’s why I interrupted you. So what we have to do is, again, we have to change the narrative of what a teacher thinks. And so now, and I’m about to get into trouble, stepping all the way back, the challenge with our students in mathematics is really a challenge with our professors. And so this means that there are lots of us who are superbly comfortable, who have lifetime jobs with tenure, who have been successful in quotes. What does that mean? That the way they think about success has been, “Oh, I’ve had five to 10 students come back and say, ‘That was a great experience. I have students who are going to graduate school. I have students who are doing research.’” And so the revelation for me was, wait, I’ve had hundreds of students, and I’ve gotten dozens of feedback, [LAUGHTER] and I’m using the dozens of people… like you only hear from the people who are doing great, because the people who don’t like you aren’t going to tell you to your face, right? And so I’ve had biased feedback and like, “Well, wait, what happened to this person, this person, this person, the person I don’t even remember, was I really serving them?” And I actually don’t know the answer to that. And so there’s something about each of us as professors completely being rigorous about how we teach and critical of the way we teach, so that we continue to use new methods. And so this is happening in our discipline, where lots and lots of people are now doing active learning, lots and lots of people are doing less lecture. And so this is not a critique on lecture. It might be a critique on lecture with five people, or it might be a critique on lecture with 300 people. But again, like if you’re lecturing to 300 people for however long, how do our students feel? Later today, I’m doing some stuff with Math for America, and last year, when I did some stuff with them, I had a person and I’m gonna ask whether this is similar for them tonight, who has 35 students in 45 minutes, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And that person has said, “Well, I can’t do anything but lecture, I’ve got to get the content out.” And this is in the context, of course, in K through 12, where you might have your state forcing you to make sure you do well in the course tests. And so they’re under so much pressure. But again, as we imagine, I’ve seen people do active learning with 35 people in 45 minutes, and so that’s something that you just have to try. So the first thing I want to say is that, what have you been doing? Have you gotten the feedback that it’s working? What are the grades look like in this system and continue to try new things. And so you’re not going to do stuff overnight. The thing that I don’t want to see is that you’re doing the same thing you’ve been doing the last 25 years. That we can’t have. And so I am making a call of action to our professoriate to try something new, be bold, and what better time to do it is when you can’t be fired. We have a lot of anti-tenured, tenured people, in the sense that a big part of the point of getting tenure is to then explore, say what you feel, to not be put in a box. And then that’s sometimes when we become the most conservative. I do want to shout out, though, our lecturers and vital faculty, the visiting, the instructors, the tenure track, the assistant professors, and so forth, that are also thinking about these things, who don’t have the job security, who may not have the ability to be creative in the classroom also, because then they might be judged for it, or say, you know, “You can’t do it that way and don’t have that job security, also.”

Rebecca: As someone outside of mathematics, it seems to me like there’s a role for faculty in other disciplines to play here as well, because there’s a lot of fear mongering around math, I think, from other disciplines and things, maybe from their own mathematical experiences. But I know, as a designer, I’m constantly helping students try to find some relevance to the math so they’re not so scared of it, because I think it’s really important for their work in just about every discipline.

Aris: Yeah, I think there’s a big disconnect between mathematics and all the other disciplines. And again, to your point, I think it’s because everyone has their own walk with mathematics, and oftentimes it’s not a positive. So that means sometimes we get advisors outside of math who are saying, “Oh no, no, don’t take that. You don’t need that extra math class.” Or we get people who are just like, “Well, let’s just get you through math as quickly as possible,” or whatever. For me, that just means we need to be having more conversations like, “What does it look like?” I’m dreaming again. What does it look like for a designer to sit down with a math professor, or the two departments to sit and talk together and say, “Okay, well, what do you want mathematically for our students? What do you want design-wise, for our students? How do these things intersect?” And so we’ve been in a silo, mathematicians for a while. People just leave us alone. And now we see what’s happening. Math departments are closing. People are losing majors because now we thought that we could just do our own thing, serve, have our majors, but now people are really starting to ask the question, “Well, wait, the way that you’re teaching. It doesn’t feel like it’s so relevant.” For too long, we’ve asked, “Well, how am I supposed to use the quadratic equation in real life?” And actually, I don’t think we properly responded to that, because I think the proper response is that, “Oh, solving the quadratic equation is useful in cognitive agility in this way, this way, this way. And in addition to that, you’re right, [LAUGHTER] right?” Yeah, that like “Doing this exercise is helpful in these ways, and you probably won’t see it in the future.” And so that’s why we made quantitative reasoning, that’s why we have these other courses. But that took us a very long time to do that, to actually respond to people, like my school didn’t even have a quantitative reasoning class until finally, we looked at all the DFW rates and it was just like, “Well, we have to do something else.” Now, what happened there was this movement from college algebra to college algebra and quantitative reasoning didn’t have to happen, but it was a “Wait, we’re not moving on college algebra. At some point we think college algebra has to be this. And therefore, if you want these people to succeed, then we have to create this whole other space for them.” Again, as I dream, I would imagine that mathematicians as teachers would say, “Well, wait, maybe we could teach it differently,” but we didn’t do that. But I think lots of times, mathematicians and math faculty are movable objects like “No, it has to be taught this way.” And then very few people outside the discipline can come up to it and say, “Well, no, can’t you change?” And them saying, “You can’t change, because it has to be like this. We’re the experts.” But when I also think about other disciplines, I get jealous. Yeah. I mean, because, like, other disciplines get to talk about the great ideas and the systems that I’m in that I see we don’t get to talk about the great ideas. The notion of infinity is one of the great ideas that mathematics brings to the world. And so when I think about Calculus II and sequences and series, and people are going to start to groan when they listen to this, that we fail to see that we’re talking about how infinity operates, one of the many ways that infinity operates, and it’s an absolutely brilliant idea that very few people talk about because we’re too busy talking about ratio tests, and then you just get bogged down in what tests are we using, or does this have a limit? And you just forget that the notion of adding up an infinite list and getting a finite number is like so unbelievably profound. But political science gets to talk about justice, U.S. history gets to talk about the Constitution, and philosophy gets to talk about God, and over here, we have just as deep things, but we’re so tied up in procedures and making sure that you have the right minus sign. Do you see the difference that I’m bringing up? That in literature, people get to read Toni Morrison, and I’m not saying that I’m jealous that they have better things. I’m saying we have just as good things. But why is it that we are bogged down in this minutia, but they’re not critiquing Toni Morrison’s grammar. They’re just reading Toni Morrison and becoming better humans. Where is the becoming better humans in Calc I, where’s the becoming better humans in algebra? And that’s the open space that I dream of in our classes.

John: I’m hoping going forward, that we will still see students studying the Constitution in history classes. [LAUGHTER]

Aris: That’s right.

John: That may be changing in the current environment. [LAUGHTER]

Aris: I shouldn;t be laughing.. I don’t want to laugh, but I also don’t want to cry. That’s right. [LAUGHTER]

John: Sometimes we have to.

Aris: That’s right.

John: But as you’ve noted, students often come in with this fixed mindset, and they often have not had that much success in their experiences before they get to us. Should there be, perhaps, more effort in society to transform K-12 math instruction so that we don’t lose so many people from a discipline that’s so important?

Aris: I agree with that, and I think we also have to be careful. So I have no time for figure pointing, because what I’ve seen when I do professional developments all the way K through 50, whatever it is, right? As I just go, yeah, that I always see the pointing back. And so when you go to the ninth grade, it’s like, well, eighth grade, and then eighth grade it’s like, well, it’s Elementary, and then Elementary, it’s like, well, it’s the parents, and then it’s like, it’s the reverse induction, right? You just go back, well, then maybe we shouldn’t have kids at all, right? …if you want to just keep doing that. And so I think we’re all in this. And so there are two things, you come to a young person, you come to a student who’s had a bad math experience, and they’re a sophomore, and it’s the first day of class, and so you know they’ve had a bad math experience, and so you can’t send them back into K-12. They can’t go back. And so we can say, “Oh, this might be… and I have said this earlier, that this is a response of a bad math experience they had earlier.” And yes, we need to fix that. But this person’s in front of me today, and so I don’t want us to be confused that, “Oh, that this person is a lost cause.” The responsibilities on me now to create a better mathematical experience for this person and to help them as much as reasonable, and we can need to, as we were saying earlier, have conversations with K through 12. So what are real, fundamental conversations between math faculty and K through 12 faculty. And so what’s nice particularly about Oswego is that you all have the opportunity to make real connections to the K through 12 places, to schools that may feed into Oswego, and sit down with the faculty and say, “Oh, what’s happening?” I’ve seen this happen out west at Sonoma State, where they have relationships with K through 12 schools, and they’re having those types of conversations. Now, those conversations aren’t easy, because there’s status that you have to disrupt about in the space and that you just have to deal with, but once you break that stuff down, become one in community, then you can start to have real conversations about, “Oh, wait, you’re teaching this, but we’re teaching this. And so when did they end up learning this? And oh, do you really have to teach that?” Yeah, and you just have good conversations.

Rebecca: As we’ve been talking today, was thinking about an early experience I had in my teaching career where my previous institution I was invited as the non-math faculty member to join an assessment retreat and spent an entire week out of town with the math faculty, who I really didn’t know very well, and we had a great time, and found all kinds of connections between our disciplines. And for me, I think that was a really important opportunity. So I thought it was a really wonderful opportunity to collaborate across disciplines and to get a better understanding of what the faculty in that department were doing, what some of their objectives were, but also I shared what some of the art and design students, some of the struggles that they have, and I thought it was a really rewarding opportunity, and I actually had forgotten about it until this conversation. [LAUGHTER]

Aris: That is fantastic. That’s fantastic.

Rebecca: But it sounds right along the lines of what you’re advocating for as a way to share and disrupt and move things forward.

Aris: Absolutely, absolutely.

John: From society’s perspective, the rate of return to higher education, despite the popular perception, is pretty much at the highest we’ve ever seen, and that’s especially true in STEM fields. And yet, students of color, though, have been seriously underrepresented in STEM fields, perhaps partly because of underrepresentation in faculty and in their prior interactions. What strategies could be used to help reduce some of those inequities in terms of the mix of students who are entering into STEM fields?

Aris: Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of things. So this is an individual and a systemic issue. So individually, I think you have to go all the way back and say, “Well, what does it mean to be of color? What does it mean to be a student of color? What does it mean to be a person of color?” And again, the challenge is that people don’t even want to ask that question. Like, student of color or person of color, came into the vernacular at some point, and we just didn’t stop and say, “Well, wait, what does that mean?” And so when I say that I am black in the United States of America, people who are listening, what does that mean to you? If you’re listening to this five weeks from when we record and I say that I’m black, what does that mean to you? What do you think that means to me? Now I want to be clear. The reason why I ask is because when Lakeisha comes to your class, and Lakeisha is a young black woman, and you haven’t even thought about what it means to be black, then are you going to try and convince me that you’re prepared to teach Lakeisha? Do I want my daughter in your class? And the reason why I bring this up is because it means everything to me to be black, it means everything to me, and you haven’t even thought about what it is. So now I’m coming to your classroom, and there’s something fundamentally important to me, and I look at you and I already know the signs that it doesn’t mean anything to you. And so then you are already positioned to me as someone who doesn’t even care about me. And now let me step all the way back. Everybody’s nice, everybody’s a good person. Everybody’s loves their family, loves the country. Everybody’s nice, nice, nice, nice. I’m not talking about nice. I’m talking about love, actually. I’m talking about realizing the nature of the place in which we live, the United States of America, which is again a place of ultimate brilliance, but a place that also has had significant struggles, tragedy and terrorism amongst people of color and black people in particular, right? We can be both, brilliant and have terroristic backgrounds. And so for me, that’s the first thing on an individual level when we think about again, when I said earlier that we have to think about our students individually, that is tied to, “Wait, that person is black in America, that might mean A, B, C, D, and E.” Now it could mean that. It might not mean that, but sociology is a thing. Sociology is real, and the studies show that, about marginalization, how people feel. Stereotype threat, microaggressions, those things are real things. And so that means, again, we need to be educated about what that might mean. But let me take 17 seconds… that for me to be black means two things at least. It means that, again, I come from a miraculous people. I come from a group of people who have been terrorized and stigmatized for centuries in this country, and somehow, our most profound voices, our most powerful voices, are ones that are trying to teach love and justice for everybody. That’s a miracle, like somehow, like in the face of all of that ugliness, our leaders come out talking about love and justice for every single individual. Being black also means that I’m part of a social constructed category where I am not getting things that other people are getting because of skin color, and that’s personally, and that means systemically. And so both of those things are happening, are a part of who you see in me. But what that means is, when you look at someone else who is of color, then you might say, “Oh, that person’s walking around in this society, and they might be experiencing stuff just because of the color of their skin.” And again, coming back to that fundamental question, “How might that make them feel? How might they be struggling today to learn some of the stuff that I’m saying.” And most importantly, how is it that in these four walls for this hour and 15 minutes, in a space that I fully control, how is it that I can make this space different, different from what the rest of the world has told them their whole life? So that’s the personal one. Now, systemically, I’ve been thinking a lot about mentorship, and so if we have 17 students of color, 17 marginalized students in whatever category, whether it’s women in STEM also, 17 students at my institution who are part of a category, a social category, they might be black, they might be whatever, then the question for me becomes, how is it that we get them the right mentors, and that means that focused attention by someone who is ahead of them on the road for their goals, someone who is going to sit with them and look in their eyes and have them convinced that, at least for that hour of that meeting, that no one else in the world as important as they are to that person, someone who is going to awaken something within them, all potential that they didn’t even realize they had. And so when you have good mentors, then you provide pathways for people that they didn’t even think were possible. Now, of course, the challenge is, how is it that we need to train good mentors? We need to get them out there. Right now, we are not trained to be good mentors, particularly across identities, particularly across racial identities and cultural backgrounds. And so my immediate hope is that we would get mentors to people about what it means to be a STEM professional, because what mentorship also does is it gives people who are trying to get into STEM, STEM identities. It opens the doors for them to be like, “Oh, I can do this.” For 25 years, I’ve heard young people say, I saw this person, I interacted with this person, and I realized that I can do this, particularly when Ketanji became a Supreme Court justice. I just remember the very next day, a 16-year old black girl said, “Now that this has happened, a whole world has opened up for me.” I just want that to sit with the listener, that this person will never meet Ketanji. They simply need to just see her become a Supreme Court justice, and now a whole world is opened up for them. Now that’s just from 1000s of miles away. If we can somehow get mentors to each of our young people who are trying to do this, then it gives them, like this personal connection too. It makes it even powerful.

Rebecca: Some of the change that you’re talking about, the dreams that we’re dreaming together, definitely are some of the long game… [LAUGHTER]

Aris: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes.

Rebecca: What are some of the short game moves that we can make to get to that longer game?

Aris: Yeah, so then I think it depends on who I’m talking to. So then if I’m talking to someone who’s seasoned, who’s comfortable, who is going about their life, and it’s easy, again, as we said before, I want you to say, “Well, I want to do something bold and different.” And again, I guess the first thing I would say to you is, “I want you to send your students the feedback.” We can do this in multiple ways. I want you to have some real conversations with and get some real feedback from your students about how things are going with you and whether you are doing your due diligence and uplifting people in the discipline of math. If you are new or you have little power or you’re just moving up the ranks, there’s something about also looking at your practices, but being able to get a critical mass, like just joining other people. I think this is true for the older faculty too, but just joining communities and listening to how other people teach and how other people operate in their craft, they continue to just be educated. So again, that’s on the individual level. On the systemic level, I’m looking at our leaders. So then I’m talking to department heads. I’m talking to deans and to presidents and provosts about doing more than just not rocking the boat. And so when we have young people, when we have these disparities in STEM across racial lines, that’s on you, leader. So I’m really trying to push leaders to just say, “Okay, wait, not under my watch.” 17 years from now, I want you to be able to say, “Maybe things have not change, but here are the three things that I tried and they failed, and even in the failure here the 15 things we learned,” that the too many leaders who would just come into position and just try to keep things still and when in fact, your job may be to shake things up so that more people can thrive. So I just met so many leaders that have just been like, “Let me just come and steer the boat,” when, in fact, you may need a whole new boat. You may need to be on a new river. Yeah, so I’ll say that, in that delineation, I mean on the individual level, you’ve got younger faculty, older faculty, and then they might be doing things, but then at the systemic level, our leaders need more courage. They just need more courage. And so the challenge that I have, and it goes back to what we said earlier, is that in order to get courage, you have to be compelled. There has to be a compelling reason for a leader to say, “You know what, I’m going to do the thing, and y’all are not going to like me. We’re going to make classes unified at the 1000 level for math, because this is what our students deserve. And I don’t care what you think about, because the data says that having classes that are completely different from professor to professor makes students suffer, and therefore we must unify. Let’s get to work on it together. And if you don’t like it, okay, we can talk about that too, but this is what we’re doing.” And so that person who does that is compelled by the suffering of our students. The lack of access for our students is the driving factor. There must be something that compels leaders to change, otherwise they won’t.

Rebecca: I wanted to follow up on the feedback forms because you’ve mentioned that throughout our conversation today, and for someone who’s like, “Yes, I will do this,” what would be in said feedback form?

Aris: Oh, thank you for saying that. It would be questions that if they got the answers to, it would shake them and make them really uncomfortable. The thing that I want to say, that I should have said from the beginning, is that it’s comfortable or outstanding, you only get to be one. It’s comfortable or outstanding, you only get to be one of those. And so when I created my feedback forms, and I started filling them, and I started putting in the questions, like, oh, wait, if I actually heard the real answer to this, I’m not going to feel good. And then part of me said, Well, that means it needs to go on there. And so what does that look like? That means like, “Am I doing a good job? Am I giving you everything you need? What do you want me to change?” That one’s not so bad, but it’s just like, “Did I say anything that bothered you? How is my language?” It’s just stuff that like, are you having good time, right? So that’s about me, and so how can I just be better? But then the thing that was transformational for me is when you ask anonymously, people about their lives, and just say, “What’s your biggest challenge today? What are you going through right now? What excites you the most? What do you do when you’re not in school?” So feedback forms do so much if you are authentically digging into them and asking questions that might push you out of your comfort zone, because it’ll change you forever. Because when someone says that all your math problems are binary in terms of gender, and it leaves me out, then it changes the way that I teach forever. Forever. One sentence changes the way I teach forever. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s tons of feedback forms out there, so you can go and investigate those. But for me, it’s “Okay. How am I doing?” And “Who are you as a person?” I have colleagues who give them out after tests also who have, like, logistical and utilitarian reasons for giving them out. But for me, as you might imagine from what I’ve said so far, I’m trying to figure out, am I doing a good job in humanizing you, and who are you as a human.

John: Is this something perhaps that people should do at the start of the semester, just to gather some information about who the students are in the class as well as during the class?

Aris: Yeah, you’re giving them out a lot. Yeah.

John: And you mentioned anonymity. I’ve gone back and forth on that in terms of gathering information about students. Students are likely to be more open when the forms are anonymous. On the other hand, if there’s specific concerns for specific students, there’s some benefit of knowing who the students are. And I’ve sometimes done a mix of those things, where I’ve had some things which were just anonymous and others where students let me know at the beginning of the term, in particular, if they have any special concerns or needs or any challenges they faced in classes in the past.

Aris: I appreciate that, yeah. And so I definitel moved the anonymous route. And then I will say that some of you wrote some things that I think you and I need to talk about personally, and I hope you know who you are, and say, yeah. And then I don’t know if I get any more specific than that, because of anonymity reasons, but yeah, so I try to open the door that way. But yeah, I like your idea of mixing them for sure.

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

Aris: Oh, just the same old, same old. And that’s enough, [LAUGHTER] right? So, yeah, I wake up every morning with a mission, and I’m thankful for that. I’m overwhelmed by that, that I am trying to serve people. And first, it starts with my own daughter, my wife, and then I get to then interact with people who are trying to change their lives forever. When you’re in college, when you’re in the educational process, when I’m teaching in K through 12, those young people in particular don’t have the vision yet to understand the path that they’re on. But in particular college, even though some of those people have been forced to go to college, they are there and they’re trying to change the trajectory of their whole life, and to play a role in that is a gift, and I have to treat that with care. And so I wake up every morning just trying to figure out how in the world can I help that person on their educational journey. And that’s all I want to do. And so I’m in a sweet spot where I can do that every day and make a living. So I’m superbly thankful for that. So for me, in general, I’m always trying to make quantitative spaces better for everybody, because better quantitative spaces lead to better quality of lives. And so across so many different levels, if you see me, I’m either with my family, or I’m playing pickleball, or I’m trying to make quantitative spaces better for people for better quality of lives.

Rebecca: …sounds like a good balance.

Aris: Yeah, that’s right. [LAUGHTER] That’s right.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again. And again, we really enjoyed your work here back in January during your visit.

Aris: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for your thought-provoking ideas.

Aris: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

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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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379. Mentor Mindset

Posted in emotion, engagement, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, motivation, pedagogy, randomized controlled trial, teaching
February 5, 2025

Many attempts at influencing adolescent behavior fail. In this episode, David S. Yeager joins us to the use of a mentor mindset by faculty members can  increase student motivation and academic success.

David is the Raymond Dixon Centennial Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a co-founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. He is best known for his research with Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth and Greg Walton on interventions that influence adolescent behaviors. David has served as a consultant for Google, Microsoft, Disney and the World Bank, and is the recipient of over 15 awards for his work in social, developmental, and educational psychology. He has published extensively in scholarly publications, and his research has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many, many other places. David and Carol Dweck and others have also created a MasterClass on The Power of Mindset. His most recent book is 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Many attempts at influencing adolescent behavior fail. In this episode, we examine how a mentor mindset may be used to increase student motivation and academic success.

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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 David S. Yeager. David is the Raymond Dixon Centennial professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a co-founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. He is best known for his research with Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth and Greg Walton on interventions that influence adolescent behaviors. David has served as a consultant for Google, Microsoft, Disney and the World Bank, and is the recipient of over 15 awards for his work in social, developmental, and educational psychology. He has published extensively in scholarly publications, and his research has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many, many other places. David and Carol Dweck and others have also created a MasterClass on The Power of Mindset. His most recent book is 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. Welcome, David.

David: Thanks for having me.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… David? Are you drinking any tea with us today?

David: Uh…. No, I am not. I read a short story about tea recently, so that’s the closest tea story that I have for you.

Rebecca: Alright, we’ll count it, we’ll count it, we’ll count it. [LAUGHTER] I know you have water with you, which is, as we know, the foundation of tea.

David:It’s pre tea.

Rebecca: It’s pre tea. [LAUGHTER] How about you, John,

John: I am drinking a spring cherry green tea, continuing the trend of cherry-based teas. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yes, the theme continues. I’ve reverted back to the blue sapphire tea.

John: And I thought the spring cherry tea was particularly good with a couple feet of snow that we’ve had in the last few days here.

Rebecca: And it is currently snowing very hard out my window, John.

John: I don’t have windows here, so it’s perfectly nice here until I leave. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss 10 to 25 which brings together a large volume of research findings concerning student motivation in a very accessible manner. Educators at all levels have been raising growing concerns about student motivation. That’s always been there, but it seems to be a little bit more serious in the last few years, while many students report that educators seem to be out of touch with their lives and their experiences, so this book is extremely well timed. How did this book project come about?

David: Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s kind of a convergence of a few different things. So one was just my observation over years that as a society we are so bad at changing and influencing adolescents. One program after another seems to not work, and probably the impetus for that was I was asked to write a paper for the special issue of something called the future of children, like 2017, it’s on social and emotional learning, and it’s an awesome group of scholars and led by Stephanie Jones, who I admire very deeply, and I was asked to write the chapter on adolescents. So what works for social and emotional learning for adolescents? And tell you what, like I kept looking in the literature, and nothing really worked. And then when you look at the meta analyses, it seemed like there was this negative trend where the older the kids in the study, the less effective the program. And the programs that did seem to work weren’t social and emotional learning programs, they were something else that later somebody labeled social and emotional learning. It was like Facing History and Ourselves, which is like a history curriculum. And the side effect of good history education was some better social and emotional outcome. But it wasn’t like they were teaching you square breathing or meditation or something. And I just wanted to get to the bottom of it and I was like, why is it the case that we’ve got all these things that seem to work with younger kids? Because SEL programs did have pretty good results, third, fourth, fifth grade, maybe even younger. So like, what’s going on, seventh grade to 12th grade? And what I discovered was that in general, we kind of have the wrong view of young people, and therefore we keep defaulting to the same kinds of wrong programs, and then we’re shocked that they don’t work, but it’s because they come out of a particular mental model. So everything from DARE to Just Say No to anti-bullying programs, and the list goes on, and I went on sabbatical at Stanford about 10 years ago to try to get to the bottom of this and figure it out. And this book involved a lot more than that, but that’s what started it. And so it’s really been kind of 10 years of work to expand on that idea.

Rebecca: So you just mentioned DARE, and you talk about this and many other educational interventions in your introductory chapter. And similarly, college faculty who give students detailed feedback on their writing often see little feedback being implemented in follow-up submissions. Can you talk a little bit about why many interventions that are designed to improve the lives of adolescents are just so unsuccessful?

David: The first kind of passive insight was that there’s two things: One is that what the programs are trying to change, like the basic hypothesis they’re going after wasn’t the right thing to be changing. And the second is that even if they were targeting the right thing, they didn’t say it in the right way. So just take anti-bullying. The most common way to reduce bullying is to teach kids social skills. It’s like, “Well, the reason why you’re bullying is you don’t have a way of dealing with social conflict that is productive, that you have an unproductive habit.” And the research ended up suggesting that actually, for young kids like third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade, bullying is associated with poor social skills. It’s kids like some of my kids, where they’re ADHD and they just kind of get a rise out of bothering people and saying things repetitively, or getting a rise out of somebody. But for middle school and high school, often bullying is associated with better social skills, because the kind of bullying you’re doing is strategically destroying someone else’s reputation while maintaining plausible deniability, so the adults can’t get you in trouble, but then all of your friends see it, so that way you gain status and you look powerful, and that’s actually very sophisticated to do that. Real world bullying is more sophisticated than what you see in Mean Girls. And it’s not the case that kids need more social skills, because, in fact, the more social skills they had, maybe the better they would be at bullying. So what you often saw actually was an increase in bullying as a result of middle school or high school anti-bullying programs. So that was one big issue. And the second big issue is that even if you were working on the right stuff, and the right stuff, by the way, would be something about trying to maintain your reputation and gain status in a productive way, rather than by destroying others, would be an alternative, for example. But the way the programs are often framed is super lame. I mean, it’s like, DARE is like someone with a neon fanny pack throwing out headbands, like wearing socks and sandals and like, 0% of kids are like, “Oh yeah, you’re right. Next time someone I have a crush on offers me a cigarette, I’m gonna be like, ‘no, because I dare to resist drugs.’” No one’s gonna say that. And in fact, like, if you think back on DARE, they teach skills through scenarios, but like, what are the scenarios? It’s like, you do a skit in front of the class, and like, one kid stands up and they offer the other kid drugs, like, “Hey, man, you want some cocaine?” And then the other kid’s supposed to be like, “No way, dude.” And in every case, the kid offering the drugs looks way cooler than the nerd who says no, and all you’ve done is prove in front of everyone that awesome people offer everyone drugs. And so again, like drug use, on average, goes up in response to DARE and similar programs. So the way to summarize this is that you have to be attuned to the adolescent desire for status and respect, their desire to maintain a good reputation in the eyes of people whose opinions they care about, and if you don’t, then you might just push them away, or you might even make the bad behavior more enticing. And so that’s a launching off point for this book, where I try to suggest better approaches.

John: One of the other things you talk about and you’ve written about is how to provide feedback effectively to students. And one thing that many people have been taught for a very long time and still are is to use that compliment sandwich where you put some critique in between two positive comments. And it turns out that that’s not very effective. One of the things you suggest is that a wise feedback strategy may be more effective. Could you talk a little bit about why the compliment sandwich doesn’t work and why wise feedback may be a more effective way of providing feedback that students will respond to?

David: Yeah, so I’m starting from this premise that young people are like exquisitely sophisticated in they’re thinking about their reputations and how others are perceiving them socially, and given that, when they’re critiqued by a teacher or a coach or a manager or anyone who has power over them, then they’re not just processing it as information to include in their mental model of perfecting a skill, there’s a social implication: “Who is this person who’s implying that I’m not good enough yet? And why do they feel entitled to very publicly say that I’m inadequate? And furthermore, do they think I’ll ever be not inadequate? Like, is there any possibility that I could grow and improve?” So they’re asking these big, existential questions that have their roots in concerns about their status and reputation. What is the adult thinking? Well, they’re thinking, I don’t have to give you any feedback at all, like you’re lucky that I’m even spending any time on you, and don’t complain, stop whining, and the least I’ll do will be to try to soften the blow by being a little nice, but if you don’t like that, then you’re entitled, and you’re a wimp. That’s kind of a lot of adults’ approach. And so what occurs to them is to be like, Alright, well, I don’t want you to cry, so I’m gonna do the compliment sandwich. And the compliment sandwich is something like, “Look, I love your enthusiasm.” It’s a nice thing. And then it’s a negative thing, like,”All of your work is terrible and has to change.” And then there’s the nice thing, like, “Thanks for turning it in on time.” And we do our mental math. It’s like we’re balancing a stoichiometric equation. And then we say “Net positive. So you should thank me for this feedback.” But again, you haven’t addressed the core question in the young person’s mind about their status and their worthiness in our eyes. And so the alternative is to directly address the concern that young people have no value, that they have no potential, they have no future, et cetera, by using something that Geoff Cohen, a Stanford professor, one of my mentors, has called wise feedback. And wise feedback is very simply saying, I’m giving you these comments because I have very high standards, and I know that you can meet them. So it’s first an appeal to a high standard, and second an offer of support so that way they can meet it. And it turns out that that comes across as a very respectful thing to say, and therefore it builds trust, and it puts the young person in a place in which they’re open to criticism, because you’ve addressed their main fear, which is that we view them as incompetent.

Rebecca: So in 2014 you were the first author on an experiment involving wise feedback. Can you talk a little bit about this study?

David: Yeah, so in one experiment that, again, was led initially by Geoff Cohen, my collaborator, and other great people like Valerie Purdie-Vaughns at Columbia, we partnered with a school in the East Coast, and we had teachers assign their seventh grade students an essay to write. So kids write a standard five-paragraph essay, and then the teachers cover them in comments so they do whatever the six plus one writing tactics are, and they kind of do their worst, and then the kids have a chance to revise the essay or not. And the question is, when do kids get their essays back, covered in red ink and say, “This is great. I’m really happy for all of these ways in which I can improve. So thanks for pointing out my flaws, and I’m excited to fix them. So here we go.” When did they say that? And when do they say, “My teacher is such a jerk that he spent his whole weekend trashing the essay in the ego of a seventh grader.” And we found that in the default control group, where we didn’t do any wise feedback, only about 40% of kids even turned in their essays. But we also had teachers append handwritten notes on the essays that said, “I’m giving you these comments because they have high standards, and I know that you can meet them.” And then they sealed the essays in an envelope and handed them back, so that way kids didn’t know which got that note or which got a control group note that didn’t convey any new information. And then a week later, kids had the chance to revise, and what we found is that 80% of kids revised their essay in the wise feedback group. And for me as a parent, you know, I have four kids, and so if twice as many of my kids listened to the things I told them to do, then at least two of my four kids would have pants on by the time it’s time to go to school, and my life would be better. And I was a middle school teacher, and I remember spending all weekend grading essays and thinking, “Oh man, they’re going to be so grateful for all this feedback. They’re gonna carry me on their shoulders like Robin Williams at the end of Dead Poets Society and be a hero.” And instead, they were just like, “Why is this guy such a jerk?” And my life would have been a lot better if I knew about this research at the time. But I will say it’s been interesting since we published that study. There’s a tendency to over claim how important it is. Obviously this is just one assignment one time. I’m not claiming this is a magic bullet. The author, Dan Coyle, in his book The Culture Code, called it magic feedback. And I don’t like that. I don’t think it’s magic. To be honest, what I think the magic is is the feeling of dignity and respect when you’re in a vulnerable position and someone is looking down on you, and they instead assure you that you are a person of worth and value, that, I think is magical. It might happen to the post it note might not. There’s a lot of other ways you can show that, but I think when you do that, then you start tapping into what’s going to motivate adolescents to change. And the more we do that in schools, I think the better off they would be.

John: Is this something that cuts off once you pass adolescence? Could this also refer to the feedback from reviewer two [LAUGHTER] on that paper?

David: It’s funny, I’ve grown less patient as a reviewer over my time as a reviewer. I’m only mean to a specific kind of author. I lose my patience if you’re like, at the University of Chicago, and you have every resource at your fingertips and you still wrote a lazy paper, then I’m like, “I don’t have time for you.” Anybody else, I’m wise feedbacking away. But anyway, I guess I would say that I’m not arguing there’s a magical cutoff of 10 years old, all of a sudden you need wise feedback at 25 you need it, in 25.1 day you don’t it’s really more that the window of 10 to 25 is like the onset of puberty until the adoption of an adult-like role. And that just tends to be a period where your status is very precarious and ambiguous and it’s uncertain to you if you’re going to be taken seriously, if you’re going to be afforded the rights and privileges that you think you deserve. Like a good example is this wonderful study I love from 1998 nobody cites by Ruck and colleagues, and it’s on self-determination needs. And it’s very simple idea. They ask kids at what age do you think you should have a certain right or privilege? And then they ask adults, at what age should kids have it? So an example is being able to write a letter that’s critical of the principal and publish it in the school paper. So seventh graders are like, “Yeah, I should totally be able to do that.” And adults are like, “Not till 11th grade.” So you’ve got this gap. [LAUGHTER] So you got, like, four years or more, depending on the measure, there’s variation in that outcome. But like, you’ve got 1, 2, 3, 4 years where a young person is ready for some right and privilege and society’s saying, “No way.” That’s what I call the adolescent predicament, that your status and respect is in question because of that gap and mismatch, and I think you could experience that later in life. This one interesting guy read my book and emailed me. He’s a general counsel for a large like Fortune 100 company, and he’s like, “Man, I really have to worry about giving feedback to my junior associates, like when they write a brief.” So he’s thinking of himself as the mentor. And then it came out that he’s actually doing a master’s in education because he’s about to retire from being a lawyer, and he’s going to go be a classroom teacher for the sunset of his career. And I was like, as a 60 year old, but first- year teacher, if there’s a principal in the back of the room sitting there with a clipboard making notes on every single thing you’re doing in the classroom, are you going to feel nervous and worried? He’s like, “Oh, absolutely.” So he’s gonna feel back again like a 13-year old getting his essay criticized. So I really think that the operational definition of adolescents, at some level, is this adolescent predicament, this mismatch between the status and respect you think you’re ready for, that you desire, and then what you’re afforded by your context.

John: Beginning early in your book, and through much of it, you talk about the mentor’s dilemma. Could you talk a little bit about what that is and how we can address that?

David: Yeah, the mentor’s dilemma is, again, something coined by Geoff Cohen. It’s the simple idea that it’s very hard to simultaneously criticize someone and motivate them. And the reason why it’s a dilemma is because it feels like you have two bad choices, like one choice is “I’m going to be really honest and tough and impossible to please and tell you all your flaws, but sacrifice your motivation and crush your spirit.” Or the alternative is “I’m going to be nice and friendly and supportive, but I’m not going to tell you the truth. I’m going to withhold feedback.” And neither of those really feels satisfying. It feels like they’re not what you’re supposed to be doing. And what we’ve found, and what we’ve proposed, is that the solution to the mentor’s dilemma is something we call the mentor mindset, and that’s kind of being the walking, talking embodiment of the wise feedback note, where in all your interactions with young people, you’re neither too harsh nor too much of a pushover. You are very tough, you have high standards, but your supports are as high as your demands. So that way young people can meet that demanding standard.

Rebecca: Can you give us some examples of how this mindset might be implemented in a day-to-day student interaction?

David: Yeah, so mentor mindset is something that comes up a lot in let’s just say, how you deal with a student mistake. So in our work, we have this fellowship program for math teachers. Carol Dweck and I and several others developed a new program called FUSE, Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement. And the idea is that the culture teachers create in the classroom can influence whether students benefit from our instruction. So I get to spend all day giving you illustrative math or Eureka math, and correcting all your math misconceptions. But if, fundamentally, the kid thinks that the reason why they made a mistake is because they’re a lazy slacker that the teacher is looking down on, because the teacher explained it clearly and you didn’t do it, and therefore you weren’t paying attention, if that’s your default, then you’re not going to engage with this conceptually demanding, cognitively sophisticated curriculum. You’d be like “No way, because if it’s not clear to me right away, then it’s a threat.” So as a teacher, you need to have a culture in which mistakes are your friend. Otherwise you’re stuck doing a curriculum in which students only ever master things at 100% and they’re never confused, they’re never lost. Therefore, in order to create that culture, you have to have good routines for troubleshooting mistakes with students, because you can’t just blame and shame them or yell at them for making mistakes, nor can you avoid the mistakes altogether. And so I spent some time observing great mentor mindset teachers, teachers who had very high standards and were very supportive, and they make students own their thinking, and they ask tons of open-ended questions, and the students squirm sometimes. And a normal novice teacher, like I would have done, they feel uncomfortable. They think the student’s head’s gonna explode, that they’re sitting there not knowing the answer, but their wait time is unbelievable for these great teachers. And there’s a routine that I call collaborative troubleshooting, and there’s three steps. One is validating what the student has done, so like finding something right about the student’s answer. Next is asking questions to understand: so where did this come from? What was your reasoning? And that ends up being super important, because a lot of teachers immediately jump in and presume they understand the student’s mistake. Oh, you forgot to carry the two. So next time, carry the two. But sometimes we’re wrong, and what teenagers hate is when adults make assumptions about them. And furthermore, when you make assumptions and you’re not right, you end up telling them solutions that were already obvious to them, and then that’s also insulting, like imagine you were lost and you pulled over to ask someone for advice on where to go, and then they’re like, “Did you think about checking Google Maps?” You’re like, “Yes, I thought about checking Google Maps.” It’s a very insulting thing to say, like it’s the most obvious thing. So a lot of times when students come to teachers, that’s how they react, is they tell them to do something obvious that the students already tried. So great mentor mindset teachers don’t do that. They ask questions to understand before they tell and then, last, they kind of ask leading questions to build a bridge to a better understanding, and they wait for the student to piece it together in their minds. Novice teachers don’t do that because they feel anxious that the student is stressed, and then they rush in to tell the answer. This goes back to classic research from Mark Lepper on expert tutors in the mid 90s. Mark Lepper, a Stanford psychologist who coined the term intrinsic motivation initially. He spent years just watching great tutors and found that over 90% of what they say is a question. They’re not sitting there telling you what to think. They’re like, “Huh? Where did that answer come from?” or “Is that right?” And then the student has to have a coach in the head to try to solve the problems. There’s a lot of other examples, but I love that one, both because it’s intuitive once you get it. It’s also not obvious when you’re a novice teacher,

Rebecca: I feel like those same three steps would be great in the healthcare industry.

David: Any industry. You don’t think people like doctors talking down to them for making such idiotic health choices?

Rebecca: I was thinking that might be a great place for teachers to get some empathy. Like, “Where have you been talked down to recently?” Or tech, or any of these places.

David: Well, the interesting thing is, we have this fellowship program for teachers, and their empathy is not hard to get. Just ask them about a time they talk to an instructional coach. Instructional coaches, ideally, are these endlessly empathetic listeners. But that’s not often how it works. It’s like they race in, they tell you what to do. You’re doing everything wrong, and I’m going to check your test scores next week. And I have compassion for the coaches too, because a lot of districts, especially poor districts, use instructional coaches like backup admins, so they’re pushing paper three fourths of the day. They hardly ever get to actually coach. So without blaming any individuals in the system, most teachers almost immediately have access to this idea of everyone making an assumption about your limitations and then telling you obvious things and then making you feel like an idiot. So even though they know that, that’s still often teachers’ default when they talk to kids.

John: As part of this whole mentor mindset, the goal is to treat students with respect and to let them know that you think they’re capable. But a lot of students come in with stereotype threat, a lot of students come in with perhaps some imposter syndrome that they don’t feel they’re going to be successful to begin with. How can we help build that growth mindset in students who may have some doubts about their own ability to thrive?

David: Well, I’d just say that stereotype threat often is more of a situational predicament. It’s more like they’re aware that other people could judge them, even if they don’t personally believe the stereotypes. But I think that for students who are used to adults using something I call an enforcer mindset, which is kind of all standards, no support, or as someone I interview in the book calls it: “Yell, tell, blame and shame.” If that’s what you’re expecting, then it’s very hard for students to see the teacher’s growth mindset and be like, “Yeah, that’s great. I love it,” because all they see is the standard, and they think, “Oh, here we go again, another grown up is going to yell at me for not being good enough.” So I spent a long time interviewing this great teacher who’s kind of like the best growth mindset teacher in Texas. His name is Sergio Estrada. He’s at Riverside High School in El Paso Texas, and Carol Dweck and I interviewed him a lot, like every Friday for months. And every once in a while, some kid would wander in his class during his off period, when we’re talking to him. And I would be like, “Hey, who’s the opposite of Mr. Estrada?” And, I tell you what, I’ve heard some stories. And one kid, Emiliano, told me a story about his English teacher, and his English teacher assigned some essay where they had to write the pro and con or side one/side two, and then he could only come up with one of the two. So he went to the teacher after class to ask for help. He’s like, “I have the assignment. I can only figure out half the assignment.” And then the teacher said, “Tú no lo entendiste porque no quisiste,” which is you didn’t understand it because you didn’t want to. And he was crushed by this, and came back to me and was like, “Dr, Yeager, it’s so unfair.” And I was like, “What do you mean? It’s unfair?” He’s like, “Well, I have ADHD, I only understand half of what anybody tells me,” like, “this is how I get the other half. I can’t imagine wanting the other half anymore than coming after school to come talk to this teacher to try to get it and yet she’s assuming that I was screwing around in class, that I don’t care, I don’t care about my education, don’t care about learning, and then I’m trying to, like, ruin her lesson plan by making everybody be behind and asking questions.” And like, Sergio would never do that, but he also knows when students come in his class that that’s what they’re used to. So he has learned he has to give a speech at the beginning of class explaining that this is a new culture. Say, for example, this idea of questioning, Sergio, like a great tutor asks questions way more than he tells. So if a student is doing a problem set and they’re like, “Mr. Estrada, is this right?” He’ll say, “Well, I don’t know. Do you think it’s right?” So there’s a way of doing that that does not go over well, it goes over like a lead balloon. There’s a way of doing it where you look like the jerk law school professor cold calling people and forcing them to explain their thinking, and you’re trying to humiliate them. And adults do often ask questions of kids in public to humiliate them. I mean, as a parent like, I do that sometimes, even though I don’t want to, I’m like, “what were you thinking?” Or like, “Is that the right way to put your chair away?” Or like, “Should you be grabbing that cookie?” Like, it’s not an authentic question. It’s a question meant to shame and humiliate. So that’s what kids are used to. And so Sergio, before he does his old questioning routine and his collaborative troubleshooting, he’s like, “Alright, guys, I care deeply that you are good at physics after this class. And in fact, everyone who passes this class eventually deeply understands physics, and I don’t want to deprive you of the chance to know that you can do it, so I’m not going to tell you answers, but it’s not because I’m being unhelpful. It’s because I want you to own the thinking. And every year, students eventually get it, and every year students don’t like it at the beginning. So I just want you to know that I’m not trying to shame you, not trying to embarrass you. I’m trying to honor and respect you and make you know that I think you can think, and I want you to build that muscle” or something like that. And then he’ll print it out and he’s got it on the wall. So the next time students are mad or offended and they’re thinking, “Oh, here we go, another enforcer mindset, he’s going to yell at me.” It’s like on the wall, it’s crystal clear. And then by the end of the year, these are students who say, “Mr. Estrada changed my life. He believed in me.” They’re like the first in their family to go to college. They’re getting internships at NASA. I’m not exaggerating, like every summer, students get internships at NASA, but it takes that transparency. You can’t just show up and do mentor mindset if students have that enforcer mindset baggage that they’ve experienced.

Rebecca: So I can imagine that some folks might be thinking adopting a mentor mindset might increase their workload somehow. Is that true?

David: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s one of the first things I worried about writing this book. I was like, “Oh, am I writing an impossible to accomplish self-help book?” I mean, it would be like, grabbing a diet book where like, “The best way to lose weight is to never eat anything that you enjoy.” Well like, “Yeah, I knew that. The hard part is to eat what I enjoy and still not gain weight.” So I’m not saying the best way to be a teacher is to do it 120 hours a week. And there are things that Sergio does where he’s like, “I don’t recommend anyone do this. It’s like a lot of work.” But I will say two things. One, every great mentor mindset teacher I saw had procedures and policies that they set up early on in the term, and that often involved getting peers to look at each other’s work and having a good culture of peer feedback. It’s kind of a “ask two before me” situation, and they’re not doing that to dismiss kids like gnats. They’re doing it to give them a sense of agency and teach a skill of collaboration. But that, by the way, saves them tons of time, because 80, 90% of errors, like some really high percentage of errors, are things where the minute the kid tries to explain it to their peer, they’re like, “Oh my god, I see it now.” So they actually didn’t need the teacher, like, you just need another human being when they’re explaining. So one thing is, you can still do a lot of this stuff and save time if you just have good procedures for peer collaboration and feedback, it saves you tons of time. The second is, there’s often a short-term, long-term trade off. It does take a little more time to set up procedures and create a relationship of respect, but then the whole second semester, you’ve got independent, autonomous students that are working hard. You don’t even have to like mess with them. So I remembered we interviewed Sergio during COVID, and it was like, April of 2020, and everyone’s on lockdown or whatever. And I was like, Sergio, how’s it going? He’s like, “I feel really bad.” Like, “why do you feel bad?” He’s like, “I’m bored and I feel guilty.” Like, “Why are you bored? Why do you feel guilty?” He’s like, “because I don’t do anything.” “What do you mean, you don’t do anything?” He’s like, “I post the problem sets, then students meet in groups, and they talk about physics all day. Maybe they ask me a question, but otherwise they just work diligently and then learn physics.” And he had the highest rates of passing college level physics that year in his whole district during COVID. And he like was on Tiktok all day, not because he was goofing off, but because students were so self sufficient, and I think that’s the payoff, is you use a mentor mindset, and then you get people where their work is like kind of area under the curve, leading to greater growth and learning, because you’ve created independent, agentic young people.

John: So, it sounds like giving students more agency, perhaps an autonomy-supportive instructional approach and using peers for feedback could be a really effective way of helping improve motivation and maybe some authentic assessments where students see that the work they’re doing has some intrinsic value beyond just a series of hoops they have to jump through, that the instructor is kind of imposing on them to get away from that enforcer mindset and giving students more control over the learning process, it sounds like would be really helpful.

David: Yeah. I mean, I think that there are curricular changes and pedagogical changes that are well known in the literature to be good for student learning and make them agentic or whatever. And I’m not pretending like I’m inventing constructivism or anything like that. It’s more this idea that there’s an unspoken conversation between a student and their past that is present anytime a teacher is pushing them, challenging them, using this maybe more progressive curriculum. And if you’re not attuned to that conversation, and if you’re not able to help a student see that this is different, then they’re going to be wearing a set of lenses that ’s going to cause them to interpret what we’re doing in the worst possible light. And that’s not because Gen Z is too wimpy or too woke or too entitled or whatever it is. It’s because they’re legitimately responding to prior experiences that they’ve had, and they’ve made sense of those, and they’ve allowed that sense making to influence them in the future. That’s just how human thinking works. We form little lay theories of the world based on our experience. So we kind of need to be agents of change, of giving them a new theory that when a teacher is pushing you and challenging you, it’s because they believe in you, and they’re often going to offer you support, and if they don’t, then the support is what you need to find in order to meet that standard.

Rebecca: Transparency can be really transformative and it sounds like that’s something that you’re really advocating for, is being really transparent about [LAUGHTER] doing things that’s respectful.

David: Yeah, like I’ve been saying, you can’t just presume that they will interpret your actions in the best possible light. So a good example that helps, it’s kind of an analogy to teaching, is a study led by Kyle Dobson, who’s a University of Virginia professor, and previously was my postdoc, and we did an experiment where we looked at the context of police officers approaching civilians on the street, and typically, what happens if a police officer comes up and asks you a bunch of questions, is people feel threatened, and we know why. It’s because there are all kinds of stories of arrests and police brutality and things like that. But police officers are baffled by this, because they’re like, “Well, my badge says serve and protect, and why would you not think I’m here to serve and protect? Of course, it’s what I’m doing.” And so there’s this mismatch between the intentions of the officer usually, and then the responses of the civilians. And so we did a study where we had people sitting in desks all around this downtown Austin, and then we had real on-duty police officers, wearing guns and badges, go approach people and ask them a bunch of questions, and they either launched into the questions in a control group, and there, people felt super stressed about it. They had short, kind of curt replies. Their stress physiology didn’t look good when we measured it, implicitly using a PPG monitor on their wrist, and in general, there was very poor rapport. But when the officer started the interaction with a simple transparency statement, when they just said, “Hey, I’m walking around trying to get to know the community, would you mind if I ask you some questions?” When that happened, then people were really open to the conversation. They were kind of into it, and they formed a rapport. And what that suggests is that even in a context where the institutional authority should, in their minds, be viewed as positive, but in civilians’ minds, there’s this history of distrust. And we can look, we see trust going down every single year on major metrics for police and other institutions, you can kind of create a bubble where trust can be restored if you begin with a transparency statement. Now I did a workshop one time for a bunch of principals and superintendents on transparency statements, and I gave the example of, “Hey, imagine you’re a school leader, and there’s a teacher who’s brand new, and you went and set in the back of their class and you took a bunch of notes, and you were giving them feedback. How could you use the transparency statement so that way they didn’t view your feedback in the worst possible light.” And one superintendent was like, “Oh, very easy. I would go up to him and say, ‘hey, look, just want you to know the reason why I’m observing your class is because I think you’re the worst teacher and you need to be monitored.’” And I was like, “You should not be transparent about that. Keep that to yourself, like because that is the main worry that was in their mind already, so do not say that.” So I’m not saying you should be transparent in that way. What I’m saying is [LAUGHTER] be transparent in dispelling the most negative possible interpretations and instead replacing them with better ones. I appreciate the sound of your forehead being slapped [LAUGHTER] as I told that story. That’s a real story. And they were very earnest. They’re like, this is the first person to raise their hand, like, “Oh, this is easy.” I was like, “Really, in a workshop of 100 school leaders, that’s your answer?”

Rebecca: We all know that person.

David: Yeah, they were very confident.

John: In terms of knowing that person… You talked a little bit about the importance of helping students develop that growth mindset and so forth, but there was that study by Elizabeth Canning and others that talk about the importance of faculty having a growth mindset. Both Rebecca and I at various times in various ways do work with professional development. How can we help faculty recognize that maybe having an expectation that students could grow and could become more successful in learning? How can we spread this, other than encouraging people to read your book and other resources, how can we get faculty to recognize that students can become more proficient as they work and develop skills?

David: Yeah. I mean, I think that the beautiful work by Mary Murphy on fixed mindset cultures and Elizabeth Canning is a collaborator, has suggested that what faculty believe can dramatically influence the decisions that they make and what makes sense to them from their perspective. The question of how to change faculty is a little different. So I don’t think that you can just give K-12 teachers or college professors the student growth mindset intervention, like, “Hey, here’s this stuff about the brain.” And a big reason why, we’ve learned, and I write about this in our PNAS article last year, led by my postdoc, Cameron Hecht, growth mindset is really good news to students. It’s like, “Oh, awesome. I don’t have to feel dumb anymore when I make a mistake.” It’s not good news to teachers sometimes, because they’re like, “Wait a second, if mistakes are learning opportunities, then it sounds like I have to re-teach you stuff after you make a mistake, and then I have to regrade it after you try it again, and that sounds like more work.” And as I’ve said, that’s not always the case, but that’s like people’s first interpretation. And so you can’t use that same argument. What we found is you need to use something called a values-aligned argument. And this is a framework developed by Chris Bryan and me. Chris is a business school professor at UT, but he’s a social psychologist by training, and values alignment is very simple the idea that if you want to change someone’s beliefs or attitudes or behavior is easier to align the targeted attitude, behavior, belief, with what they already care about than it is to try to convince them to care about something new. And in the case of teaching, for college professors like we’re very rarely held accountable for what we do, and very few people are ever told even how to backwards plan, let alone teach. And for K-12, they do obviously care a lot about instruction. And obviously college professors do care, but like, in my experience, often the best college professors know about as much about teaching as like, the middle of the road K-12 teacher, because we’re just not given much pedagogical instruction. So for professors, like it’s very hard for your culture of learning and creating growth mindset culture to get to the front of the list. For K-12, it’s also hard because you’re given an endless number of things you’re supposed to be changing and fixing at all times, and you’re going to three PDs a year and there’s three new binders you’re going to put on yourself. It’s going to make you feel guilty that you never implemented them. And so the way we think to cut in line, to get to the front of the line of your motivational priorities, so that a growth mindset culture, or what I call a mentor mindset, is what you want to prioritize, is to align it with what people already care about. And what people already care about often is having the kind of classroom where, when you walk in, students are tracking what you’re doing. They’re motivated, they’re engaged, they’re curious. They ask you questions about your content area. They care more about the learning than the grade. You don’t have this constantly threaten them or blame them or console them to do the minimum. It’s really motivating to have that kind of better motivated classroom culture. And so we say, “Look, if you believe that no one can grow and learn and that it’s all or nothing, that your first grade will be your last grade, then students will pick up on that as disrespectful, because you’re basically telling them that their efforts are wasted and that there’s no point in trying, because if you got an A, well then you’re going to get an A at the end. If you got a C, you’re going to get a C in the end. So what’s the point of doing anything?” That’s a disrespectful way to run your class. And if within 10 to 25 young people are sensitive to disrespect, then they’re going to be disengaged, if that’s how they feel. But if you want to engage them, they need to feel respected. And the way to respect them is to make them feel like they can grow and learn even when they struggle. So we frame growth mindset not as like you should do this, like eating your broccoli kind of thing. It’s more like, maybe there’s some broccoli lovers out there. I don’t there’s an alternative. I don’t want to offend any broccoli eaters. So brussels sprouts…

Rebecca: I like both of those.

David: …specifically brussels sprouts covered in bacon as an appetizer, is mine… But anyway, let’s just pick a food that people kind of have to hold their nose and eat for any objecting broccoli or Brussels sprout eaters and like, that’s not gonna work. But what will work is saying this is a way to be the kind of person you always want it to be, and that, I think, is motivating and exciting for people. And so mentor mindset, framed as a way of respecting young people, and therefore as a way of engaging them, is, I think, more effective.

Rebecca: I think that’s a good pro tip [LAUGHTER] to wrap up on. So I want to be cognizant of our time, so we always wrap up by asking: “what’s next?”

David: Our big initiative right now is basically taking the mentor mindset ideas from the book, and spreading them to educators. So we have a fellowship called the Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement or FUSE that Carol Dweck and I and our collaborators, we personally wrote all the materials and are very excited about them and the results look really good. So in a large randomized trial that’ll be coming out this year later, we find that teachers, if they change their mindsets, they change their behavior. Students, then, when they get the mentor mindset classrooms, they view the classroom as more respectful and more motivating. They feel comfortable raising their hand and asking questions, making mistakes, and then they learn more. And the effects, well, I don’t know if they’ll always be this big, but they look pretty big right now, of .4 standard deviations, which is pretty large in education. And then teacher attrition is down by half, and so is burnout. So the mentor mindset stuff ends up being the only educational intervention that we know of that, in a rigorous randomized trial, changes teachers, changes students’ perceptions, changes students’ grades, and improve teacher well being, and it does so for like $23 a kid, so it’s like 10 times more effective than individualized tutoring at scale for like, 1/100 the cost. So that’s coming, and we’re thinking about how to expand that, scale it and make it better. I will say we hired Sergio Estrada as one of the facilitators for FUSE, and so it’s a real treat for them.

Rebecca: …some really exciting stuff.

John: It sounds like a wonderful program, and we encourage everyone to consider picking up a copy of your book. We’re going to be using it as a reading group on our campus, so we’re really looking forward to it, and we will include links to all the studies that you’ve referenced in the show notes.

David: Great.

John: So thank you, although I do have to say one other thing, that putting bacon around brussels sprouts sounds a lot like a compliment sandwich [LAUGHTER] in some way.

David: I mainly just listened to the Jim Gaffigan bit on bacon and so that was fresh in my mind.

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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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364. A Quest for Success

Posted in academic advisement, academic standing, academic success, active learning, classroom community, engagement, equity, growth mindset, higher education, learning, pedagogy
October 23, 2024

Students experiencing academic difficulties are often encouraged or required to complete courses to improve their learning skills. In this episode, Andrew Buchmann, David Runge, and Sean Milligan join us to discuss how gamification is transforming one such course for students on academic probation. Andrew, David, and Sean are Academic Success Advisors at SUNY-Oswego.

Transcript

John: Students experiencing academic difficulties are often encouraged or required to complete courses to improve their learning skills. In this episode, we explore how gamification is transforming one such course for students on academic probation.

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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 Andrew Buchmann, David Runge, and Sean Milligan. Andrew, David, and Sean are Academic Success Advisors here at SUNY-Oswego. They are working on a revision of a one-credit course for students on academic probation that incorporates elements of Dungeons and Dragons. Welcome, Andrew, David, and Sean,

Andrew: Thank you for having us here.

Sean: Thank you.

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

Andrew: I am drinking a green tea. A pretty basic quality green tea.

John: …and David?

David: I do. I almost forgot, but I have a very nice ginger peach with fruity notes from Teavana.

John: Very nice. And Sean?

Sean: Yes, just a pretty classic Earl Gray, nothing too fancy.

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca: I took a picture of it, John, because I have a new one today. I have Brodies famous Edinburgh tea.

John: As opposed to the Brodies Scottish tea.

Rebecca: Yeah, usually it’s a Scottish afternoon or a breakfast tea, but I got really daring and tried a different one. I’m not sure it tastes that much different.

John: And I have English breakfast tea, just the plain English breakfast tea, nothing fancy,

Rebecca: Not famous Edinburgh tea.

John: No, this is just Twinings. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your plan to add Dungeons and Dragons elements to your academic success course. First, though, could you give us a little background on this course? What does it generally cover, and how often does it mean, et cetera.

Andrew: So I can only really speak to where the class was as of fall 2019 because that’s when the Advisement Center took over teaching the course. And in that semester is when we did our first redesign of the course, and it wasn’t so much as a complete overhaul of everything, but just really trying to burrow down on what topics we wanted to discuss to get the most out of this eight-week long course. So the class itself really centers on academic success strategies, things like growth mindset, time management, effective learning strategies, things like that, and goal setting as well. And the idea is to help students who are on academic probation, or even those who aren’t on academic probation, maybe get some more skills in terms of academic success to help them be better in their other classes.

John: And you mentioned this class meets for eight weeks. How many hours per week does it meet?

Andrew: This is typically an hour-long class. Sometimes it varies, depending on if it’s a Monday, Wednesday or a Tuesday, Thursday section, and where it fits. But we’re looking at about an hour per class meeting.

David: We also have offered, in past couple semesters, at least a couple of asynchronous sections as well, to try to support those students who may not be otherwise able to fit the class section into their schedule.

Rebecca: So you mentioned the course is eight weeks. So is this a quarter course, meaning, like in the first half of the semester, or is it one that meets the second half of the semester?

Andrew: Typically, we’ll have more sections in the first half. So yes, quarter class, but in the both fall and spring semester, we will have a quarter two and a quarter four section, typically an asynchronous online section to capture any students who might have missed it in that first half.

John: What motivated the redesign of this course?

Sean: So I think a couple of different things motivated the redesign of the course. First and foremost, probably, we’re all pretty big nerds… I think we would admit to… and so we love video games, tabletop gaming, it’s a big part of our lives. And so like any teacher, I think we’re always looking for ways to sort of inject our own interest into our course as much as we can. But aside from the personal aspect, we each have a supplemental role as advisors here at SUNY Oswego. David, for example, is kind of our transfer expert and also supervises our student advisement guides. Andrew is our Starfish coordinator, which is our sort of advising platform that we use and rely on heavily. One of my supplemental roles that I’ve taken on recently is to try to increase the scholarly activity and the scholarly output of the advisement center. So as a happy coincidence, once I took on that role of trying to increase our scholarly output, I saw a call for papers for a Board Game Academics Conference and Journal. So at the same time, we’ve been noticing struggles with our students in Edu 104: a lack of engagement, poor grades, students coming in very, very late, unprepared… and really, this is not a course that should be difficult. It’s designed to help them be successful. And so seeing such high numbers of students failing, having very high absenteeism showed us that we definitely have room for improvement. So we devised this redesign to simultaneously tackle these issues that we’ve been observing in our classes. And we also did submit a proposal to that Board Game Academics Conference, which we presented at in July in Morristown, New Jersey, and we should be appearing in their online journal issue this February. So a couple of different factors going on at once. So our personal interest, putting some work out there in the board game academics journal, and really the most important thing, just trying to help our students and get them more engaged.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how elements of Dungeons and Dragons will be incorporated into the course?

David: Yeah, definitely. So it’s important to note that when we first had a chat about this, we’re trying to figure out, how can we further engage students. And we thought about the concept of gamifying, making it exciting, fun. We looked at a couple of different games. We sat down together. First we thought, well, can we do a board game? Could we modify something like the game of life, the game of college life, in some way, with pit stops along the way? Could we do some other type of system or design? But one of the reasons we settled on Dungeons and Dragons, first of all was that we had a really big interest in it, but it’s also a very immersive experience. Someone who’s playing a proper Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game lives out that character, they have those experiences. So we were hoping by tying together course learning elements with a game of Dungeons and Dragons, we could implement what they’re learning into the actual gameplay experience. So what we’ve done, and we’ve started through our pilot this fall already, so the class is ongoing right now, we basically break the class down so that once a week, Sean, who is a primary instructor for the course, is teaching about whether it’s the learning strategy, engaging with offices on campus, how mindset plays into academics, and then the other day of the week, we’ll actually play a game of Dungeons and Dragons with our students, hoping to replicate or incorporate something related to that lesson into the class material. So for example, previous week, Sean had talked about mindsets and also how you approach things like failure or successes. So in that week, we actually had them in what is considered a combat scenario in Dungeons and Dragons, where their characters were fighting monsters, and as the game went on, we had them face tougher and tougher monsters to indicate that sometimes you might fail. But then how do you return and pick yourself back up? How do you adapt in those moments? Do you rely on your teammates, the fellow players, or do you try to go it alone? And how does that impact your outcome? Beyond just the two sessions, the learning each week and the playing each week, we also infused D & D themed items even into the course syllabus. So some of the language built into there, instead of saying you have this assignment, Sean used the language “You have this quest to complete.” We identified that you have a main quest, the required elements of the course, and then a side quest, kind of pick your own adventure in order to allow you to earn points through the course. And then he also offered some incentives to timely work completion or meeting extra tasks by offering feats and perks into the class as well, where they might be able to ask the instructor for extra help or extra time on an assignment if they did something in a certain way. So infusing it both into the actual what’s happening in the class, but even into just a structure and foundational design of the course, all meant to hopefully make it more engaging and exciting.

John: Do most students come into the course having some background and experience with Dungeons and Dragons, or is this something new to them?

David: So what we’ve seen so far, and those shared personally, most didn’t have a lot of experience. There was one student who came in with a lot of experience who was very gung ho and excited, and it’s really been awesome to have that student there, because they’re actually taking the lead in the class and then helping to encourage their peers, others who have never heard of it once in their life, and they’re learning it for the first time. So that also impacted a little bit of the course design in terms of how we structure the lessons, how we’re talking to them during the D & D sessions. We know we’re not playing with experienced players, but rather, we’re having to walk them through things as true novices as well. And actually, we’re lucky to have Andrew with us, because he’s never even played a game of D & D, so he offered a lot of great feedback for us, where I’m maybe the most experienced player in the group, and even my experience is fairly limited, truth be told, but he had really great feedback in terms of some of the language we were using in the design saying, “Hey, this wouldn’t really connect with someone who has never played before.” So he offered good feedback there too,

Andrew: Just to jump on to that point too, as someone who’s not played D & D, I’m very excited for this because it’s always been something that I’ve wanted to do, and a campaign has just never fired in my personal life. So here I have this opportunity to be a part of a campaign that’s also in alignment with the work that I do on a day-to-day basis. So I’m very excited to see where this ultimately goes. And so far, the sign is that it’s pointing in a good direction for us.

Rebecca: So how have students responded, especially those who are really unfamiliar with Dungeons and Dragons. I’m really curious what the response was on day one.

Sean: So I think the response on day one was a little bit of hesitation, which is to be expected, and we were ready for that. Students who weren’t quite sure what to make of it, how it would really be impacting their course experience. But over the last couple of weeks, when we’ve been playing more, we’ve been getting into more interesting scenarios, like we’ve been having combat scenarios with goblins and other monsters, the students have really gotten into it. David mentioned failure earlier as a class concept, teaching students that failure is a fact of life and we’re going to fail at some point. We all fail in different ways, big and small. But it doesn’t have to be the end of the road. It doesn’t have to be a barrier. If you have a growth mindset, you can view that failure as a learning experience. We had this one student who has never played D & D before playing, and she kept rolling a one when she went to attack this goblin. Now, if you’re not familiar with D & D, if you roll a one, it’s called a critical miss, and it’s very bad. You completely miss your opponent to the point where you might even end up hurting yourself or inadvertently causing some other chaos to occur. And she kept rolling a one, so having these instances of failure, but we turn that back into a learning experience of, “Hey, this is like what we talked about in Tuesday. Okay, even though you rolled a one, it’s not the end of the fight, and you can come back next turn and try to improve and do better.” And so the students have been laughing. They’ve been problem solving as a group. So I would say, hesitant at first, but definitely seeing signs of improvement there.

David: And I think that’s one of the important things, that with the game, it’s not just playing the game. We’re trying in every moment to tie it back to a lesson or their experience as a student. So when that student repeatedly had those failures, we paused the game for a second, stepped out of the game and said, “You know, sometimes you’re gonna have those weeks where things are going wrong, where you’re struggling in class, maybe in the residence halls, things aren’t going well, but then you can always keep in mind that there’s another turn coming up next, another class, another week, and how you respond to that is really important.” And in the case of that student, what was exciting was a turn or two later, she actually succeeded in defeating that goblin, and was really excited. It wasn’t just I rolled and I did it, but the sense of joy and just the excitement there, which was really kind of cool. The other thing that was important for us in setting up this course, as well, as we mentioned, a lot of students don’t have experience with this. Even when we were signing up for the class, we made sure to tell them right up front, this is going to be a gamified section. We’re going to be playing dungeons and dragons. We gave them the opportunity that if they had to take this, there was that other section of EDU 104, our quarter two course. So if they wanted to go into that, they could instead, if this seemed like something that they weren’t willing to participate in, because we want everyone to voluntarily try this new experience with us really being forced into it, especially since for some students, EDU 104 might actually be a condition of their successful academic probation. So we didn’t want to negatively impact anyone in any way.

John: Now, one of the things I was thinking as you’ve been talking about this is that students have, even if they’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons before, they do have experience of working through games, getting setbacks, learning from those and moving forward and having that opportunity to make that connection explicit between that and their experience in college, I would think could be a really effective type of connection that students might not otherwise make, because many other students on academic probation don’t come in necessarily with that growth mindset towards academics.

David: Yeah, definitely. I mean trying to find ways to encourage them, to excite them, to see sometimes things work, sometimes things don’t, but hopefully, again, the purpose being, if we’re teaching something in class, we want to form that connection, and the gameplay is the secondary nature. Hopefully it’s fun and engaging, exciting for them, but more than anything, it serves as a reinforcement that what they do in the class and the game is going to help them in all of the other courses as well. Again, an example from a recent play session. The other day, we had them solving puzzles where they were going through a haunted forest and they needed to solve different riddles and puzzles and whatnot. And our main play table, because one of the ways the class is designed, we have a playing table, and then observers, like a fishbowl style, and the observer is, to make sure that they’re not disengaged during the class, are writing reflective notes. What are they observing? What are they experiencing? We actually, for that class, allowed the observers to participate as well. So we gave copies of the puzzle to them too, so they could play. And we noticed a really interesting effect during that. The people who were the live players were struggling a little more to solve the puzzle, and the observers solved it more quickly. So we first gave them the opportunity, within the theme of the game, to say, would the players like to commune with the spirits of the forest, the people around them, to maybe get them hints or clues so they’re able to use their classmates to help them through those struggles. But then Sean tied it back to well, why was it that we think maybe those observers solved this quicker, right? It’s not for a lack of any intellectual ability. They’re all working really hard. They’re using teamwork. But maybe it was the stakes in that moment, the stresses that they were the ones who the focus was on, they felt more time pressures. They felt more confined to the bounds of the game, where the others in a more relaxed setting, were able to solve that and process that. So trying to draw together, “Well, how might that relate to your education, in studying versus test taking?” And hopefully that’s helping them to see those connections and then remember that when they go into their courses as well.

Rebecca: I know some of the motivations you had indicated at the start of this conversation for exploring some different options for this class, included student motivation, absenteeism, etc, and it’s still a bit early in the semester, end of week four, I think that’s where we are. How is it looking for students, are they attending? Are they staying motivated? Are they staying engaged so far?

Sean: So far, yes. Our results are very promising. I was actually just doing some quick calculations, and the last time I taught this course was a non-gamified version in spring of 2024, for the first four weeks, I had an average of 24% of my class absent on any given day, nearly a quarter of the class absent, which is a very high number. Currently, through the first four weeks with this gamified version, we’re seeing only 9% absenteeism. So that, to me, is a really promising sign that they’re more engaged, that they’re coming to class. Another interesting effect that I’ve noticed… we all know as teachers that students can be unprepared sometimes, they can show up to class without the most basic of writing utensils, paper notetaking supplies. One thing I have not reminded them a single time to bring their dice for our gameplay sessions, and yet they have always had the dice, not a single time has a student forgotten their dice. I think that, to me, is a really cool example of how the gamification is not only encouraging the students to show up and be present, but to be prepared for class and prepared for gameplay. And of course, we’ll be learning through the gameplay, so they are prepared for class and they’re bringing the appropriate materials.

John: Do you think that’s because it’s forming more connections across the students, they’re getting to know each other better, they’re seeing themselves as part of a team, which might also help lead to more success later, if students feel more connected to other students, and perhaps more generally, the institution.

Andrew: I can say, as an observer of this… so Sean is teaching the class right now, and because David has a lot of experience in the Dungeons and Dragons game itself, has been DMing for us, I’ve gotten to sit back and watch, and I’m seeing students who, in my typical section of EDU 104, who want to engage with one another. They are having conversations in the gameplay back and forth between what’s happening in the game, how to help one another. “Hey, you should do this because of your abilities. They would help us in this situation.” So even amongst themselves, the peers in the classroom are engaging with each other in ways that I don’t think I’ve ever seen them engage in a typical EDU 104 class. So I think the signs are pointing in a good direction for that for us, that maybe that’s a part of it, is they’re able to develop a more solid relationship with their peers, because in order to advance through the game, you have to work together. You have to communicate with each other, you have to rely on each other’s strengths to make up for your own weaknesses.

Rebecca: And some of my experiences of teaching gamified courses in the past, one of the things that I have observed is that students quickly discover that learning is not just about themselves, but they feel a sense of responsibility towards each other, and that they quickly learn or discover that they have to show up for each other and that they are responsible for each other, and they’re responsible for the learning of each other. And in some ways, it seems like gamifying this particular course is a really great opportunity to demonstrate this particular skill set.

Andrew: I think of a perfect example of this in the most recent game session where one of the students chose to do a maybe less effective move for themselves and their character, but knowing that, by using this move, it was going to make the enemy prone, and therefore allow his teammates, who could then use their strengths to tackle that particular issue or overcome that particular opponent.

John: This reminds me of a conversation I had a number of years ago with Bill Goffe, a former colleague who’s now at Penn State. He had introduced team-based learning into a class that had some issues with attendance before. And he said when students were working with teams and they were depending on each other, if one of them didn’t show up, there was positive peer pressure on them the next time saying, “Hey, we needed you. You weren’t there for us,” and it was a really remarkable transition.

David: Yeah. I mean, we’re definitely seeing, whether it’s in the game players in the class, generally, the students are relying on each other, and some of that is within the game, but sometimes it’s understanding the rules of the game. And you can see those who have picked up the game mechanics more quickly, because it’s a very hefty game, are helping the other ones going through that, and it’s not just, Hey, you’re on your own. You’re figuring this all by yourself, but we’re going to collaboratively do this, because your success is my success, and down the road, maybe in a later turn, you might save my character, where I might save yours as well. But it’s really cool to see them interact in the context of the game and how they’re learning and processing all this.

Rebecca: It’ll be interesting to see if those relationships carry out beyond the bounds of the classroom.

John: So are you still able to cover the same learning objectives you were before, but through this game mechanic?

Sean: Yes, we are, absolutely. And so that’s the purpose of dividing our assignments, or our quests, as we’ve rethemed them. We’ve divided them between main quests and side quests. So main quests are mandatory, being able to pick mandatory assignments the students must do allows us to ensure that the learning objectives are still going to be met. And the side quest gives students an opportunity to still meet the learning objectives, but showcase their learning in a way that they’re more comfortable with. So if one student is more comfortable picking the presentation sidequest, they can do that, but if another student is less comfortable with presentations and would rather showcase the same learning through a traditional paper, a poster project, or something of that nature, we allow them to do that. So that gives the students some agency over their own learning, which I think is a really powerful thing. So we’ve kind of designed the main quest and the side quest to make sure they’re still hitting the same objectives, but just giving the students options.

David: And to that as well, it’s really forced us, I think, as instructors, again, Sean being the primary one, but we’ve been consulting, myself and Andrew. It’s forced us to really distill down what are the most relevant, important, must know pieces of this class as well, because we’re functionally going from having this quarter chorus with two true instructional days to having half of those instructional and having half of an experiential day as well, where hopefully they’re gonna let them practice that. So we had that conversation at the beginning of the semester and said, “Are there lessons that we would have usually done that maybe aren’t quite as not, I wouldn’t say important, but for the purpose of success and growth and helping them to learn?” We might pull back up, or maybe we’ll add it into our Brightspace course, and we’ll have that be a supplemental reading or an add on reading beyond the class as well, to continue the learning.

Andrew: And I’ll just add to it, the onset of this when we were going through the redesign process of the curriculum for EDU 104, we put an emphasis on not changing what the course content was, if anything, it was just as David mentioned, refining it to make sure that we were allocating enough time for the experiential component of it. But our cornerstone of the class was, we are not doing this just to play D & D, although that would be great, and I’m sure some of the students would love to do that. There’s a purpose for this class, for students who are on academic probation, not only is it a requirement that they must complete it, but we really want them to take those learning objectives and then apply them to their other courses. Really, from the beginning of this project, we have focused on making sure that those learning outcomes stay true, whether or not this course is being taught through a D & D style gameplay or in its traditional sense, which we will be doing next semester. We are going to have both the D & D version of this, the traditional version of EDU 104 as well as the asynchronous online sections to make sure that no matter what the student’s preferences are and our options for modality, that we’re still meeting those learning objectives.

Rebecca: So you’ve really modeled a great opportunity for this particular kind of class, students on probation, where motivation is really key to stay engaged in a really important base. But are there other opportunities where a game-based strategy would be really effective?

Sean: Yes, absolutely. I think game-based learning can be really effective in a variety of classes across the disciplines. So when we were at the board game academics conference in July, I want to give this person credit, Dr. Archie Fields at the University of Calgary is a philosophy professor, and he also uses Dungeons and Dragons in his philosophy courses. One of the really cool examples he gave of how he can teach philosophy to students through gameplay is the example of the trolley problem. Many of your listeners, I’m sure, are familiar with the trolley problem, this famous thought experiment that I’m probably going to butcher this, but there’s a train coming down the tracks, and it’s currently on track to, unfortunately, hit, say, five people, but you have the option to flick a switch, redirect the train where it’s only going to hit one person. And so it’s this ethical and moral question of, would you intervene to save five people, but then you’re choosing to redirect the train or the trolley towards one person, and Dr. Fields restructured this as the dragon problem in Dungeons and Dragons, and actually has the students play out this moral quandary, which I think is really fascinating. And this got me thinking just about other classes and other fields that could use Dungeons and Dragons or other role playing games. If you’re in a zoology or biology class, you could be in an environment seeing animals and different species of wildlife in the game world, and observing their behaviors. We can think of so many examples. But I think it’s definitely something that’s transferable to other types of classes as well.

Andrew: Anything where the experiential component, for logistical reasons, financial reasons, whatever it might be, where you can dive into this world through the theater of the mind, and maybe some extra equipment that you might have on your hands too, to be able to provide some more visual details for this. But really it gives you an opportunity through that theater of mind to experience things that otherwise you wouldn’t get to in a traditional classroom setting, because you’re just learning about maybe the theory or doing some rote work based on whatever that concept is, but through something like Dungeons and Dragons, you have the opportunity to experience these things, if only in your mind, but still experience them. And then it gives students the opportunity to reflect on, “Well, how did it go? What were the benefits of doing it? What didn’t you like about doing it?” versus if you’re only ever dealing in theory, you might never get to apply those concepts.

David: One of the cool things we’re practicing this in a higher education setting. But there actually is a fairly rich history of this being put into the K through 12 setting as well. Wizards of the Coast, which is the parent of Dungeons and Dragons, they actually have a D & D beyond educators toolkit, and they offer an educators’ license where you can get some of the materials. Mention this you’re a teacher, and pick up some of those things for free, some of the resources, and then they have actually, akin to lesson plans, basically scenarios, pre-planned modules that you can then work with students in different grades as well. So the opportunity for that immersive, experiential, not just in theory, but trying it yourself, type of gameplay and learning, is there. And I think what we’re trying to do is bring it into our course in areas we’ve seen it be successful already.

Andrew: And what we’ve noticed, too, in our research is that there’s a lack of scholarship work with tabletop gaming and role playing, gaming used in classrooms at the college level, great expansive work in K through 12, but not as much in higher ed. So if there’s opportunities out there, this is definitely a place where scholarship can definitely come from.

John: Are you going to do anything differently next time, or does it seem to be working pretty well as it’s currently structured?

David: Some of it is the work in progress that we’re actively learning along the way. But again, as an example here, I was just talking with Andrew this morning about our observation that sometimes those observers in the classroom, we bounce back and forth between how engaged they are. So we tried having them use puzzles, doing reflective things, but I’ve been looking through ways that we can more greatly incorporate them, actually trying to draw some inspiration from AI as well, which I know is one of the big things we’re talking about in education now, and found some ideas to potentially have the observers, the non players maybe voice the roles of NPCs non-player characters so they can be directly involved. Maybe they do some of the dice rolling. Maybe they are assistants to the DM, the Dungeon Master, the one running the game as well. So that we’re not only having a collective group of four or five students in any given day be the main participants, but as much as possible, we can integrate everyone into each gameplay experience as well, because we saw how much more invested they were, how much more excited they were, rather than running the risk of distractions on the phone or other coursework, but we can be fully immersed in our class in that moment.

Andrew: We’re also still trying to work through the scaling problem of this, because right now, I think with the current EDU 104 section, I think 11 students are enrolled in the class right now, but that’s a manageable number, especially with our play versus the fishbowl groups. But I taught a 30-person section of EDU 104. I don’t know how I’m gonna make that work right now. That’s something we’ve got a lot of work to do to figure out how that would be incorporated in a larger classroom. Would we be doing more sessions with different groups? Would we have maybe a student take that role of Dungeon Master if they feel comfortable enough? So lots of ideas that we’re kind of spitballing to see what might work better as we scale this to a larger section.

David: That was a good point, where a typical D & D session, you’d have four to six players with one DM, the Dungeon Master, leading it. So if you have a much larger class, it can be really difficult. If I remember correctly from our conversation at that board game academic conference. The example we saw actually had the students running it as DMs in kind of smaller groups too, there. One of the unique challenges of EDU 104 is that it is a quarter course. It only has so many contact hours, so unless you have people coming in who are really familiar with the content already, you’d be trying to balance running the game while learning the game at the same time, which is why we decided to be the DMs for this time, because we already knew the rules.

Rebecca: Well, it sounds like a really interesting experiment. Thanks for sharing it with us, but we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

David: So we still have a few weeks left in the course here, after which we’re going to dive through some of the information we get back, both on continued attendance and engagement in the course as well, and we’re preparing to then submit that paper based on some of our findings. Longer term, hoping to again replicate this for spring semester, and looking at how we’re going to adapt it. Do we look at trying to implement this into an online section of the course? There is a very rich history of text-based role playing games, online role playing games, but how do you then still incorporate the experience from student to student and make it effective so it’s not just a game, but still has that learning element as well. So that’s one of the challenges at least I know I’m working on, because I would likely be the instructor for the online section.

Sean: I’m just really appreciative of being invited on.

John: Thank you. This has been really fascinating, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about what you find at the end of the term.

Andrew: Thank you for having us, John and Rebecca.

David: Thank you very much.

Sean: 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.

[MUSIC]

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.

[MUSIC]

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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337. Pre-College Programs

Posted in authentic learning, diversity, engagement, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, learning, teaching
April 17, 2024

The transition from high school to college can be challenging for many students. In this episode, Sally Starrfield joins us to discuss the role pre-college programs can play in preparing students for college. Sally is a traveling Corporate Facilitator as well as an HR and Educational Consultant based in Durham, NC. She consults with precolleges to create revenue streams and identify courses and faculty that are appealing to academically curious middle and high school students. She has worked in a variety of instructional and administrative roles in North Carolina public schools. She designed professional development curriculum and provides career counseling for seasonal employees at Duke University. Sally served as the Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at the Duke University Talent Identification Program from 2009 to 2018 and then worked as an HR Specialist, Assistant Director, and then the Director of precollege programs at Duke University from 2019 through 2023.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The transition from high school to college can be challenging for many students. In this episode, we discuss the role pre-college programs can play in preparing students for college.

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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 Sally Starrfield. Sally is a traveling Corporate Facilitator as well as an HR and Educational Consultant based in Durham, NC. She consults with precolleges to create revenue streams and identify courses and faculty that are appealing to academically curious middle and high school students. She has worked in a variety of instructional and administrative roles in North Carolina public schools. She designed professional development curriculum and provides career counseling for seasonal employees at Duke University. Sally served as the Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at the Duke University Talent Identification Program from 2009 to 2018 and then worked as an HR Specialist, Assistant Director, and then the Director of precollege programs at Duke University from 2019 through 2023.
Welcome, Sally.

Sally: Thank you, John. Good to see you. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Hi.Today’s teas are:… Sally, are you drinking some tea with us today?

Sally: I am. I am drinking Mandarin ginger on this cold day in North Carolina.

Rebecca: Nice. I was just thinking it was like a heatwave here. I walked outside in the nice sunshine.

John: Yes, and the temperature here is I think was about 19 when I came on campus this morning as part of that heatwave. But we did see this big yellow thing in the sky, which we hadn’t seen for a while, so that was kind of nice.

Rebecca: How about you, John? [LAUGHTER]

John: I am drinking ginger peach green tea today.

Rebecca: Nice, and I have a jasmine green.

John: I suppose that we should note that I met Sally through my work at the Talent Identification Program and then at pre-college programs. So we’ve invited you here today, Sally, to discuss the role that pre-college programs can play in helping prepare students for college. Most secondary and much college instruction is targeted at the average students in a class. And we’ve talked a lot in this podcast about those students who are not very well prepared by their schools for the academic challenges they will face in college. But might this also sometimes occur for students who are quote unquote, gifted and talented?

Sally: Absolutely. We all know that differentiating instruction for each student is difficult no matter if they are at one end of the academic spectrum or the other. We all know of those stories of highly gifted, curious, academically inclined individuals who are not successful in school. Oftentimes, school is not designed for kids who are really energized by one subject or one topic. A lot of times schools are designed to make adult pleasers out of kids from a young age: “Sit in this desk in this row for this amount of time until you are called on.” And that doesn’t work for all students, and especially as they get older, and they start to think for themselves and question for themselves. So we do have a lot of academically gifted students who fall through the cracks, and who just are not successful in regular schools. And we see with the burgeoning online schools and various options, a lot of those students are opting out of traditional schools. And that’s why pre-college programs are often a really good answer for some of that curiosity that they have intellectually, and without the pressure of grades that traditional schools require, as the gatekeeper to go on to the next grade, or that’s how success is defined, is by a grade,

Rebecca: Do some students become bored and perhaps just give up in the K-12 system?

Sally: Oh, yeah, absolutely, and John and I have talked about this. We have witnessed this multiple times through the years in programs with our summer students. And we also know of a very successful award-winning professor at a prestigious university who was one of those students when he was a kid and just barely getting through seventh grade and then came to an academically gifted program at Duke in the summer. And when his parents met with the instructor at the end of the summer, and the instructor was talking about how he was just one of the most gifted students and such a good leader and really took on the serious roles in the classroom of leading the other students and using the university library and using every resource the university had to further his curiosity and his intellectual drive. His mom repeated the name of the kid [LAUGHTER] and said “No, my son is usually the one who’s in trouble, who’s told to sit in his seat, and to not question authority.” And he was like, “Well, that doesn’t apply here. He used this opportunity to lead.” And so that changed his whole trajectory in school because his mom knew that he had the capability. And he went back to the school and she went back to the school and said, “We’ve got to do better for him. This traditional way is not working for him. When he is allowed to lead, when he is allowed to question and go deep into a subject, he can really be successful.” And we know that’s true for a lot of our gifted kids who get bored. What we know about gifted students is that they want to go in depth into a subject, not just the wide breadth. When they’re in traditional schools, they’re in a classroom for 45 minutes to maybe an hour and a half, maybe four classes to eight classes a day, depending on the school schedule. And when we’re looking at students in pre-college programs, they are in a class anywhere from three to maybe even six or seven hours a day, and it’s one subject. So they’re going into that depth and really learning and satisfying those intellectual questions that they have, those big questions that so many of our academically inclined students, maybe not students who are driven by grades, but students who want to know the answers to their burning academic curiosity.

John: One other thing that I’ve often observed is that there have been some students who were told they’re gifted and talented while they’re in K through 12, and they can just coast through their classes without really doing a lot of work, without really facing very much challenge. And many of them, when they come to college, get really surprised when they’re faced with their first really substantial challenge. Might that be another role for pre-college progams in just giving them this sort of challenge that they’ve never been exposed to, so that they learn strategies for dealing with that, and perhaps develop a bit more of a growth mindset? Because if they’ve been told all through their K through 12 career, that they’re just really bright and really talented, it’s really easy to get this fixed mindset. And then when they face their first challenging course, sometimes they just give up and disappear.

Sally: Absolutely.

John: Might pre-college programs be effective in giving students a challenge without them having to worry about grades, without them getting to a college class where they haven’t learned any of those strategies, and they might end up not doing so well in college?

Sally: Yes, absolutely. I think that one of the beautiful things about pre-college programs is most of them do not offer grades, there are some that are designed to give college credit. Those do have grades associated with them. Sometimes they are just pass/fail, but the majority of the programs for academically and intellectually gifted students and pre-college programs, they are for the sake of learning, they are for the sake of enrichment, based on courses that students want to take. And so, without that pressure of grades, learning for the sake of learning, it just frees up a lot of that emotional energy, that angsty-ness [LAUGHTER] that’s associated with high-pressure situations in schools and with parents, and all that tension is just gone when you’re learning for the sake of learning and when you’re with like-minded peers. But John, to your earlier point, yes, there are a lot of students who are often the smartest kid in their class, maybe even in their school, maybe even in their town. They’re used to winning the science fair. They’re used to winning the state spelling bee and things like that. And then they get to a pre-college program, and they say, “Oh, these are all the other kids [LAUGHTER] from the other States and around the world who are doing the same thing.” And it can be little fish in a big pond, as they say. And they can have impostor syndrome. And you and I have both seen this. There are some emotional response sometimes from the kids, and they’re like, “I’m not supposed to be here.” And so that challenge sometimes is disconcerting at first, but it is what all of us need. We don’t grow in our comfort zone. We grow when we’re challenged. And that’s true of our students as well.

Rebecca: In addition to maybe not having grades, what are some other ways that these kinds of programs provide some of that emotional support or that growth in that area?

Sally: Yeah, I think a lot of it starts with just being aware that like-minded people, your age-mates are not always your idea-mates. And we put kids in schools with kids who are just their age. And so when we put them in classes that they have selected, that they are interested in, and the kids are in an age range of maybe eight through 10th grade, and they’re all studying econometrics, which is not something they would study in most of their middle schools and high schools, or astronautical engineering, they are finding these like-minded peers, and they have these discussions that they couldn’t have in their regular schools with their peers. And also, the discussions are different with their instructors, and rather than what they would be in their regular schools with their teachers… who are trained teachers… but when we’re looking at our instructors, they’re subject matter experts, who most of them have taught on the college level, even if they’re graduate students, they’ve taught some undergraduate classes. If they’re faculty they are used to teaching undergrad or even graduate students. So that helps our students in pre-college programs as well.

Rebecca: I Imagine another aspect of these pre-college programs is living on a campus and living away from home. Can you talk about that aspect of the program and some of the transitions or learning that happens for students in that aspect as well.

Sally: Test driving college is a big part of a pre-college program. So even learning to do their laundry, living in a dorm, sharing a room with a roommate. Most pre-college programs, students do share a room with a roommate. And that’s where a lot of their learning and their growth comes from. Because sometimes they’re meeting people from another country. Most pre-college programs do attract a global audience. And so even for a lot of our students, just meeting kids from other states or kids with different interests, because the kids usually who are sharing a room, they are not always in the same class, and anywhere from 8 to 20 classes offered, depending on how large the program is, each term in a pre-college program. So yes, there’s a lot of exposure there. And we do replicate the college experience where they have office hours, so they can be with their instructors. And we encourage that. And so it’s that test drive of college that helps them be more prepared wherever they end up at university.

John: One of the big topics in higher ed, and we’ve been talking about it quite a bit on the podcast is the use of alternative grading approaches compared to the traditional grades with letter grades or numeric grades and so forth. And much of the discussion focuses on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. In the Duke TIP program, and the later pre-college program, how was learning generally assessed?

Sally: So, if your listeners haven’t listened to the Unessay episode that you all did, it’s my favorite episode, by far, because that was new information for a lot of people. Pre-college programs, they haven’t been calling it that unessay necessarily, but they’ve been doing alternative assessment for years. So in a pre-college program, that’s one week to three weeks long, there’s not a lot of turnaround time for grading and all that; there’s not a full semester. So it’s very rare to assign a traditional research paper. But the students have the same access. They have the Library, University librarians, and for our students, many of them have never been to a university library. And there’s this vast difference between a middle school and high school library and a university library. They have access to our laboratories, very often for the science classes, and to law libraries, for law classes, and courtrooms and things like that. So when they are in these real-life simulations, and often going out into the community to experience, for an architecture class, they usually end up going to an architectural firm and interviewing architects. So having these conversations, these interviews, working with librarians, working with people who are working in the field, working alongside doctors for modern medicine, disease, and immunology class using patient simulators that the med school students are using at the university, all of those things, that is learning and that can be assessed just with the students in office hours talking to their instructor, they can be assessed with their reflection journals at the end of the day. They can do presentations, and I’ve seen some really creative ones too. Kids make up a series of memes about their experience they had going to a water treatment plant for an environmental science class. So there’s no limit on the way to assess their learning. And especially when we’re looking at classes that are not for credit, they’re truly for enrichment. And make no mistake, it doesn’t mean that it’s less important in their academic career, or in their preparation for their professional careers and for their college career, because this deep seated yearning that they have to learn these topics often propel them to the success they later achieve in life. And John, you can tell so many stories about that, from your former Duke TIP students and Duke pre-college students who have gone on to do amazing things academically and career wise, and books they’ve written, and you stay in touch with a lot of your students. So the relationships and networking they’ve created.

John: We’ve had several of them on the podcast. I think our most frequent guest on the podcast was in one of the early cohorts at the Talent Identification Program before I started there. I didn’t start until 1987. But the first cohort was in 1981. And I also knew many of the other people from the early years because many of them came back on staff for several years. So I got to know quite a few people from the early cohorts as well as the students I worked with later. It’s a really impressive group of people.

Rebecca: I think it would be interesting to have John talk a little bit about his assessments and his classes too, because I know he’s done some really interesting things in the classes he’s taught.

John: Well, long before, there wasn’t even a term called on essays, I used to do the same thing in the TIP program, where I told students, they had this capstone project, and it could be in any format they want. And some of them did debates. Some of them wrote songs, they created a wide variety of ways of demonstrating their learning. And one of the things I had given them as an option, based on the Dance Your PhD competition was I said, “if you want, you could do some type of interpretive dance illustrating some concept.” And for several years, they didn’t take me up on that. But then for three years in a row students did, they wrote a song that they performed or sung, while they were doing the dance to illustrate some of the concepts they had learned. They had a lot of fun with that, and I recorded all those, and I let them share it with their parents, and so forth. More recently, I’ve been teaching in the pre-college program, which is a shorter program. So there’s not as much time to prepare such things. But students do presentations at the end, where they present their research, and parents are able to attend either in person if they’re picking up the child at the end of the term, or they can watch it over Zoom. So most of the parents were able to watch the students do their final presentations. And that’s something that both the students in the program and the parents have really enjoyed.

Rebecca: Such good examples, right?

Sally: And we have to remind your listeners that you’re talking about doing interpretive dances about economics and economic terms and econometrics. And so there’s just a creativity that the unessay, if we want to give it a label, allows for and the other thing that I think that these type of assessments do is, I think a lot of times in our traditional schools… and I say this as a career educator, I had started out as an English teacher, I was a literacy specialist, I was an assistant principal before I worked at Duke… and so I think that what we do is, in our efforts to be creative, we tell the kids “Oh, do a group project,” and we all have been in those group projects that are just absolutely terrible experiences. And they’re not about learning, and it’s just about getting through. But a lot of times we think, “Oh, this student, they can take on different roles, and they can work from their strengths.” And when we’re asking adolescents to work with other students who they may or may not [LAUGHTER] get along with, and that they’re still trying to figure out their own strengths. And then we’re putting them in these simulations. It can be really difficult and just kill the joy of learning. So I like the unessay and the non-traditional assignments for assessment, especially when students have the option to work individually, or to work with a group, but I am not a believer in forced group work for adolescents. We all do it in graduate school. I’m sure you have MBA students listening and I know what your life is like. And so it is all group work all the time for a lot of you. So we do want students to thrive individually in their assignments, and still allow creativity there.

Rebecca: So, programs like this are expensive. [LAUGHTER] What role do need-based scholarships play in offering some equitable access?

Sally: They are so expensive. And the majority of the expense is feeding and housing the students. And so for most of the programs more than 80% of the cost, and this can be $5,000 for a week sometimes. And that can be daunting to families, but more than 80% of that is feeding them and housing them. And remember, they have round-the-clock supervision. So there’s a lot of staffing that goes into it. So yes, having financial aid is essential. And most pre-college programs do have some sort of financial aid. And there are also community-based organizations that will often support students in their summer programs, and you can Google community-based organizations support for pre-college programs. And it just depends on the community you live in. Here in North Carolina and the Research Triangle Park area, some of our larger companies are tech companies, some of them are pharmaceutical companies, support students when they write and just ask for it. And they write essays about why they want to study at a pre-college. And also pre colleges, they’re associated with universities, usually, and so the universities have a vested interest in this as well. And they want students to want to go to their universities. And so sometimes there’s support from certain departments, a lot of times there is an endowment, especially if it’s a long running pre-college program. And so there are options for financial aid, and most of them offer, sometimes the term “scholarship” is used, but a lot of times “financial aid” is used. And I think a lot of people are surprised, I’m in touch with a lot of families who are surprised and like, “Oh, I think our family might make too much money.” But what they do is they look at this the way a lot of universities are looking at financial aid now, it’s depending on how many children you have, how many children you have in college. And so if you have a family two to more children, and you already have a student in college, they’re often taking that into account and are able to provide at least partial financial aid often.

John: Both the TIP program and the pre-college programs primarily serve students with high levels of academic performance. Might students also benefit from pre-college programs targeted at first-gen students and students from school districts that are not well equipped to adequately prepare students for college-level work?

Sally: Absolutely. I will say that because students know going into a pre-college program, especially the ones where you’re taking one class for maybe six to eight hours a day, a minimum three hours a day, it’s pretty self selecting. It’s usually students who are very academically curious at least. And there are a lot of first-gen students who come through, a lot of them just need to be told about the opportunity. So maybe they haven’t learned about it from their siblings or their parents at home. But we have a due diligence as pre-college providers to make sure that we are talking to the guidance counselors, we are talking to the organizations that are working with first-gen students, that are working with students from less advantaged communities, socio-economically. And so, yes, there’s definitely a place for making sure that there is full access. And that starts with just making sure that our marketing materials are inclusive, they need to be inclusive. You will often find that there are people working in pre-colleges who will translate for parents. Our courses are taught in English here in the US in pre-college programs. But many pre-colleges have assistants for working with parents who their first language is not English, whether they’re based here in the US or globally. So yes, definitely, we want to have that replication of the college experience where students are meeting diverse people. And so that’s going to be socioeconomically and where they’re from.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a little bit about potential enrollment funnels that might come out of pre-colleges, but what are some of the other benefits to colleges and universities for offering these pre-college programs in the first place?

Sally: So, highlighting what their strengths are and using their resources that they have. If they have an MBA school, and if they have…, I can think of one university that has a Bloomberg simulation center for stock market trading… and so highlighting, that students remember that, that’s just great advertising in what they offer, and getting it known to students from other parts of the country or parts of the world. But also a big benefit is the employment that can come for the university from this. Undergraduate students are needed to be teaching associates, they’re needed to be residential assistants in the dorms, they’re just essential to helping the pre-college students acclimate to the campus and showing them around, making them feel comfortable, making sure they’re safe. And having graduate students test drive their own teaching. And it’s really important for us to remember that many of the pre-college programs really focus heavily on STEM, and a lot of our graduate students have been research assistants, but a lot of them haven’t been to Asia. And so this is a good opportunity for them to be TAs, to then learn how to be instructors and most pre-college programs have a really strong pedagogical training, where they are bringing in the staff ahead of time, they are teaching them online before they come in, and doing a lot of professional development with them about teaching and pedagogy and assessment. So it can bring a lot of revenue to a university, it can bring a lot of jobs to the undergraduates, the graduate students, the faculty, postdocs, and so it’s quite the revenue arm for many universities.

John: And along the lines of graduate students and undergraduate students benefit. I’ve had quite a few students who were undergraduate students, sometimes from Oswego some were from other institutions, who, by working in the Talent Identification Program, were able to use that in the graduate applications, which increased their chances of getting teaching assistantships. I can think of at least six or seven of my former students who wrote that up in their applications and it certainly didn’t hurt their chances for being accepted and getting funding in grad school.

Sally: Yes, I often serve as a reference for our staff. And I was contacted by a prestigious law school, there was a student who was kind of on the bubble, but they looked at his experience working with pre-college students in the summer and how much he had done with mock trial simulations with the students, and that pushed him over the edge. And now he’s doing very well. And I think you and I both have seen him on CNN multiple times. John, I think you know who I’m talking about. So I know that there’s a lot of benefit from hiring undergrads through postdocs to work with pre-college students. And often some are hired from the university where the program is located. But most often they are brought in from across the country and sometimes from across the world. And that just adds to the richness of diversity for the program for the students. And it’s such a great networking opportunity for the employees of the program to learn about other people and their experiences within different subject area disciplines and what their university experiences have been.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about STEM programs, Sally, what about the humanities and the arts?

Sally: Yes. So when I started working with these programs in 2009, it was common to have a class on Shakespeare for a seventh grader. And remember that these classes, we want to make sure that pre-colleges are offering classes that they wouldn’t typically have access to in their regular schools. But as we have seen the STEM revolution, that’s what parents want to pay for. That’s what these pre- college programs are predominantly offering. And oftentimes when humanities and arts classes are offered, they don’t fill and they sometimes end up getting cancelled. And so we are looking at pre-colleges as revenue streams for universities, so they’re going to usually offer what parents are going to pay for and where the demand is. And so with the rise of STEAM, there were some arts classes and some humanities that were interwoven in with some of the science and technology. We have a long way to go there to go back to where we were even 20 years ago, to highlight the arts and humanities, and so we have to show value to the parents who are paying for it and to universities. We don’t always just offer the most popular classes, we can offer classes with a smaller number of students. And so just finding that balance is tricky.

Rebecca: And it’s a continuing problem in all of higher ed as well to continue to make the argument for arts and humanities and the importance that it has and the place that it has in our society.

Sally: Absolutely. And I think pre-college programs are a way to do this. Pre-college programs, we know can be funnels for university admissions. And so if we have a student get really excited about a theater program, or some arts or humanities course, they can end up pursuing that at a university. And so it’s definitely worth pursuing, I think, from a pre-college curriculum perspective, writing the curriculum for it, and from a university perspective of offering it.

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

Sally: So what’s next, I just really believe in pre-college programs, because I know that they are life changing for so many students, and as many have told me, life saving for some. And so what I am doing now, as I am doing a lot of consultation work with different pre-colleges and looking at their goals, looking at ways that they can use their universities’ resources to create revenue streams, to create programs that are appealing to students, and also how they can partner with their admissions departments. Where do they want to highlight their strength as a university, as a college? And where are they being inclusive to these students so that they want to try it out for a summer and then possibly as their undergraduate experience? So yeah, my consultation work, my consulting, is really fun and having that experience from the education side and also from the HR side, makes it a really deep dive that’s rewarding.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for sharing a little bit about pre- college programs with us today.

John: Thank you, Sally. It’s always great talking to you.

Sally: Thanks, John. I’ve enjoyed our many many many summers together. Great to talk with you Rebecca you as well.

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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.

Ganesh Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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295. Equity-Minded Teaching

Posted in classroom community, collaborative learning, diversity, equity, feedback, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, teaching, transparency
June 28, 2023

As our student body diversifies, higher ed needs to respond and adapt. In this episode, Bryan Dewsbury and Mays Imad join us to discuss equity-minded strategies we can use to redesign or incrementally improve our courses. Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and the principal investigator of the Science Education and Society research program at Florida International University. Mays is an Associate Professor of Biology and Equity Pedagogy at Connecticut College and is a AAC&U Senior Fellow. Bryan and Mays are co-authors, with Flower Darby and Isis Artze-Vega, of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: As our student body diversifies, higher ed needs to respond and adapt. In this episode, we discuss equity-minded strategies we can use to redesign or incrementally improve our courses.

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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 Bryan Dewsbury and Mays Imad. Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and the principal investigator of the Science Education and Society research program at Florida International University. Mays is an Associate Professor of Biology and Equity Pedagogy at Connecticut College and is a AAC&U Senior Fellow. Bryan and Mays are co-authors (with Flower Darby and Isis Artze-Vega), of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. Welcome Bryan and Mays.

Mays: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

John: Today’s teas are: …Bryan, Mays, are either of you drinking tea?

Mays: I am.

Bryan: I am not.

John: Mays, what tea are you drinking?

Mays: I am drinking chai masala, that I prepare the night before, and I wake up and it’s the first thing on my mind.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds amazing. I have an awake tea this morning, John.

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

Bryan: So I’m it odd one out with a cup of black coffee.

John: That’s not uncommon. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: One of the most common teas we have.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. Before we discuss the book itself, could you tell us a little bit about your own pathway to this project?

Bryan: Mays, you want to go first?

Mays: Sure. So my career started at the community college. And in fact, I was a postdoctoral fellow when I started, a postdoctoral fellow studying the cellular mechanisms of learning, which is vast and complex. And as a graduate student, as a postdoctoral fellow, I had this growing understanding that learning can happen, and it can happen spectacularly well, provided the right environment is there. So when I began to teach at Pima Community College, I began to see how so many of my first-generation working students, coming, showing up, doing all what is expected of them, and having a really hard time academically. And I began to understand the notion of the system and the complexity of learning. So really, for me, it started as a recognition that I, as a teacher, as a fellow human being, have a moral imperative to address what is going on. The inequities that I was seeing are not an inherent self-evident part of the system. It’s by virtue of the human-made system, that I had a choice and a chance and an obligation to start to shift and address and interrogate and even transform. So that’s how I began and fast forward to a few years ago, when Isis reached out to me, it was something that very much spoke to my heart and I said, “Yes.”

Bryan: yeah, a little bit of a similar story, I guess. I mean, without maybe recounting my whole academic career, all of the authors on this guide are people with whom that I’ve worked with in different contexts. And there’s a sense in which projects like these tend to be a combination of conversations that you’ve been having for years. And obviously, there’s a plan, there was a strategy, we carved this out and really tried to think carefully about what would be the most impactful. We also recognize and appreciate all the other books and publications out there addressing inclusive teaching. So it’s not to replace any of those, it’s really to just kind of add to the conversation nationally. We are an interesting mix in that, in terms of our individual careers, and that Isis is a provost. I’m a research faculty, but also do a lot of faculty development. Mays will probably describe herself the same way and Flower Darby is nationally known a lot of times in the online space, but really her work expands to everything. So I bring that up to say that you probably will see a lot of that complexity come to bear in the way the book is written and the kind of things we try to think about, that our faculty would need to think about, when they’re designing an equity-minded classroom.

Rebecca: So it is nice to hear all your different backgrounds and thinking about the authorship of the book, because it does help us think about, as you mentioned, the complexities of how it was written and also just the complexities of the things that we need to be thinking about when we’re teaching in this space. Your book is divided into three sections. The first section addresses class design, the second addresses the day to day operations of the class, and the final section focuses on critical reflection at the end of the course. During course design, what are some of the most important factors that faculty should consider when trying to design an inclusive course?

Mays: I’ll share some of them and Bryan, please feel free to jump in and add. So one of the things that are critical is that we approach this work with intentionality and explicit intentionality that right from the get go, even from before the students get there that we design the course to have equity in mind. And one of the factors, when it comes to course design and curriculum, is that the course has to be relevant for the students. And what the research that we found is many students find that the materials are not relevant. Now, when I think about how the brain works and how we have limited energy, oftentimes, when I see my students struggling, and I try to dig deeper and try to see how I can engage them, I usually find things like they say things like, ‘I don’t know how this is going to make me a better person,’ or ‘I don’t know how this is relevant.’ And so the brain is going to disconnect, it’s going to focus on something that is more urgent, more relevant. So we talk about relevance being very important… to explicitly make connections between students’ lives and what is in the course. The second one is transparency, why we’re doing what we’re doing. And there is a lot of research about transparency and how there is more buy-in from the students when we articulate for them how things connect, and that it’s not just busy work. And then a third factor that we say it’s really important to consider when you’re designing your course, is rigor. And we talked about the research behind rigor, and we problematize rigor, and what is the definition of rigor, and so on. And here we’re talking about academic challenge. We owe it to our students to challenge them academically, so they could succeed in their next courses, and we understand that this is multifactorial, and that we have to also find the resources so they could succeed when we challenge them academically. And so those are some of the factors that we talk about to take into consideration before you even meet your students: who are the students? what matters to them? and why it is important to cultivate the space where, when we challenge them academically, they can succeed.

Bryan: The only thing I will add because you know, we both wrote the book. So [LAUGHTER] refer pages 25 to 50, for your question kind of thing. But the only thing I will add, because this phrase wasn’t used in the book. But this phrase comes from another wonderful book called Radical Equations by Robert Moses, a civil rights leader from the 60s. And there’s a phrase they use during that time, which is then applied, he then came to apply to the Algebra Project, which he founded, which is “Cast your bucket where you are.” And that really speaks to what Mays just mentioned about getting to know your students and your context, especially at an entry level, it almost sounds like provocative, radical advice. But a lot of these things that are really important for good course design have nothing to do with the content of the class. This is not us saying that the content doesn’t matter and they should just all be signing Kumbaya for 15 weeks. What this means is that teaching is a skill and a skill that involves the psychology of the individual, the social context, both in real time but also what they brought before they showed up to that classroom. And this whole conversation is taking place because of the years we’ve been ignoring that. So I really want to kind of center that. Because I think a lot of times when people ask that question, the first thing they hear is, “Well, how do I make respiration more exciting?” Well, yeah, we’ll get to that, but this is a human being that you’re trying to build a relationship and a connection with. And that needs to take front and center before you get to inspiring them with the really beautiful content.

John: The second part of your book deals with maintaining the class, with the ongoing running of the class. And one of the things you emphasize throughout is the importance of creating a sense of belonging. Could you each talk about some strategies that could be used to help create that sense of belonging within the classroom.

Bryan: I don’t want to run the risk of listing your audience to death here. So I want to offer what I’m about to say as maybe the thing that bubbles up to the surface to me as an instructor. There’s certainly a lot of things one can do to help students feel a sense of belonging. And the approach chosen might differ depending on the class that’s been taught in the institution. One of the classes that I teach most often is intro bio and it’s a really special class for me, because it’s it’s a privilege to teach that class. I’m grateful to have the chance to welcome students into a wonderful discipline and a way of seeing the world that’s relatively unique to that space. I also like the challenge of showing a lot of students who before may not feel like this is a place they belong or see themselves doing this 10, 15, 20 years in the future. I like the challenge of showing them that this is the real thing. You can be as much a biologist as anybody else, anybody in the book, anybody you’ve seen on TV, etc. But it is a very technical space. And any technical space kind of requires a slowly evolving comfort level [LAUGHTER] as you navigate through the technicalities of it. And I think that tends to be a place where some students and faculty get stuck into how you keep that door open and welcoming while navigating this environment that really requires a lot of time and attention on the cognitive challenge. So one thing, and it might sound simple, but how feedback is given really, really matters. Without saying my age here, but I certainly went to school at a time when it was your tool, just try harder, right? …just study harder. And any grade you got you there was this sort of assumption that any grade you got was just 100% due to whether you did try well or didn’t try well enough or knew this stuff or didn’t know it. There was no discussion of the way the teaching happened. There was no discussion of your actual approaches to studying. There was no discussion about what motivates you to even do this class in the first place. And now we know and we probably knew it then too, but we know how much all of that matters. So when a student sits in front of me and they have a C, it’s not just that “Well Mays, you need to do better than this.” It’s: “Tell me how you prepare for this moment. Tell me what is motivating you to be pre-med or to want to go to grad school.” And all of those things come to be in a conversation, the goal of which is for me to see you shine in the way that I know you can. How does it build a sense of belonging? It shows the student that I am not questioning if you can become a biologist, I’m actually assuming that. What I’m working on are things that are fixable. I’m working on strategy. I’m working on things that you can do something different and see a result. And so once you know I kind of have your back in that way, your effort then becomes different because it’s just a matter of specific things we can work on.

Mays: Yes, so thank you for that. Bryan. If I were to add to your beautiful answer, I would say take the time to find out what belonging means for your students, I think we often make assumptions about inclusion and belonging and what they want and what they don’t want. Of course, I start with the understanding that wanting to belong is a human need. We’re social beings, we want to connect and we want to belong, but on a day-to-day basis in my classes within my context, what does that mean and what it would look like that’s going to be different. And while I’m going to apply what I learned, and what the research says, I also want to take the time to ask students do you want to belong? And what makes you want to belong to an academic setting or a social group? And what are some of the things that make you want to belong? And what does that word mean for you? So I think starting with that is really important. It can be really informative to our practices.

Rebecca: I really related to what you were saying, Bryan, I teach in a really technical field as well. And that technical challenge can really discourage students if we don’t make those assumptions that they can indeed be in the field that they are studying. So thanks for sharing that as your top. I feel like that’s one of my top ideas, too. And I love, Mays, about thinking about our audience, and including our audience in the design. As a designer, I really gravitate towards those kinds of ideas. One of the things that you already kind of mentioned is this idea of connections and relevance. So what are some ways that faculty can help students connect course content to their lived experiences?

Mays: I think one of the things I asked them is I talk about how learning is very relational. We are relational, learning is relational, knowledge, when we co-create it, is very much relational. So one of the things I ask them is, “Why should you care about this lesson, this topic, this context? How does it relate to your life? How does it connect to your family? How does it impact the people you care about?” And throughout the semester this is a recurring set of questions that I ask. And in the beginning of the semester, I pause, and I model the answers. I care about this, because this is how it connects to the community, the people I care about, this is how it connects to something I feel passionate about. And then it becomes an exercise that they do regularly. We do this exercise at the beginning of the class of “What is your why? And what is your ‘why?’ beyond taking this class? Why is this important? And so we connect those many exercises or “Why should you care about the acid-based physiology” to that initial “why?” exercise?

Bryan: You don’t imply this in your question, Rebecca, but it does come up a lot about relevance and how it works. And I think one danger that I want to ask faculty members to avoid is the notion here is not that every aspect of the content has to tie back to something. You may fall into that trap if everything is not connected to something, but, you know, sometimes a cell is a cell is a cell kind of thing. But there are several things that do. For me, it’s actually less a case of connecting it to their lives, per se and more a case of communicating that human beings do science, human beings do the discipline. That, in and of itself, by definition, means that there’s a social component to how it’s practiced. It introduces the cultural context within which science is done and it introduces the bias that occurs with some scientific decisions, good, bad, in-between. It brings up a different conversation once you recognize that none of these things are really apolitical, values free. The second point is, to connect something to students’ lives, you have to first know student’s life so that this way you understand, it doesn’t feel patronizing or facetious. There has to be some authenticity there about Mays’ story about getting to know the students, I don’t think she just meant know them individually, but just also their broader context. When I taught in Rhode Island, it was important to know the local and the very ancient, but also more recent history of the state, of the city, of the neighborhoods the students came from. I knew the high schools that were big feeders. Those things made the relationship a lot more authentic, because the knowledge was there first. So I think once that all those precursors are present, honestly, the connection part is not that hard, it almost comes naturally. Because you just naturally want to teach in a way that builds a history of these beautiful people. And you kind of… I don’t want to say just is automatic because you are intentional… but it is so much, so much easier, and you have this desire to do it. I’ll just add one last thing, a lot of times with teaching, and I’m speaking now, as a faculty developer, here. I get good course design, I get you want to have learning outcomes, they’re going to be measurable, etc. But sometimes, even conversations like this can get stuck within the structure of what higher ed is, which is you get 120 credits and 15 weeks at a time you take a suite of classes, and those classes give you a grade and those grades average into a number, and then you become a 3.1. Student or a 4.0 student. We get it. We get how all of that stuff works. But I know Mays well enough to know that we have much more radical visions for what education is and what it can be. We come from the Freireian school of critical consciousness and preparing students to be civically engaged to have agency and power and to see themselves as agentic parts of a democratic experiment. So what’s driving all of this is who I want you to be, not necessarily getting your good grades in 15 weeks. So from that perspective, even simple things like group work, for example, it really is actually practicing deliberative democracy. Even things like how we talk about experimental design, they bring up other questions like whose voices are not at the table when you think about these questions, like whose perspectives are you not considering? Or who are you. So if you think about this a little bit more broadly, beyond like, I just want people to do well, in this really nice subject I have a PhD in, that you tap into the more socio-political aspect of education, which is a beautiful thing, I think, but it makes the connection to social life and just broader life in general easier to do.

John: One of the things that’s especially challenging is that we’ve always had students come in with very diverse prior backgrounds in terms of their training and what they know coming into our classes, but the experience of remote teaching during COVID resulted in much greater variations in their preparation. We want to create courses that are challenging for everyone. How can we do that in a way where we’re challenging the students with really strong preparation without losing the students who don’t have as much background? What types of support can we provide to make sure that all of our students are challenged, but also have the resources to be successful in our courses?

Bryan: We could just give everybody a trophy right? Now, that’s what they say this generation is. When I put on the intro bio hat again, and that’s a place where the differential readiness is really, really apart, I would have students who last science class you take, not bio, science class, was their first year of high school next to students who were in AP, went to private school or things like that. And that’s fine. It’s fine in the sense that I’m able to design for that. And I would say there’s kind of two things I’ll say to this point. Number one, you have to be able, as an instructor, to have things in place to accurately detect whose readiness might be further behind. And specifically, what areas of readiness that need addressing, and then have the tools in place to quickly respond to that. So a lot of times just my own history, it’s hard to study. A lot of times it’s confidence. Honestly, it’s fixed mindsets around who gets to do science and what counts as doing well in science and things like that. So the first month of that class is almost like a battle, that I generally win, I think, in convincing them that this is a place for them if we consider these specific things I’m trying to show you. So a lot of times, yeah, there’s class or whatever. But there’s a lot of times spent in office hours, which we actually call student hours, because it uses a smaller group. There’s a lot of time sneaking in conversations about: Have you tried this? Have you tried that? Emails that are sent to direct people, etc. Your students will come in and I’ll just say for now, maybe kind of fly in from the get go. There are other things that they can do to grow. So those are the students I might say: Have you thought about joining our research lab? I know it’s your first semester, but it’s a good time to get to know a professor more personally and see how science is done a professional way. A lot of times those students will come to student hours. And what I would do is I put them to work. I will say, “Mays, can you make sure this group of four understands glycolysis as well as you do,” and those students will typically go on to become my learning assistants in a future semester. So my point here is that everybody has a space to grow and has a direction and an amount that they can transform. The pedagogy is you being able to figure that out? And figuring out how to respond to what growth that is needed for that individual.

Mays: Thanks, Brian, I have a couple things to add. So number one, obviously, as I hear you, John ask the question, I think it’s complex. So yes, there are students that are going to come in that may not have the academic background, perhaps they come into my pathophysiology class not really knowing the cardiac output and the cardiovascular system as they should in their previous class. And then there are students that come in ready to be challenged. At the same time, there are students that are going to come in that are going to have perhaps subtle and not so visible skills that other students who maybe have the academic background are going to have. So it’s not just that I want to bring everyone up to speed academically, I want to also bring them up to speed when it comes to issues that really matters for citizens, their empathy, their non-academic problem solving, their collegiality, and so on. So there are a couple of things I do, I want to get to know who knows what. And I tell them that I’m very transparent why I do what I do. And I tell them that this is a way to give me feedback, so I could know how to maneuver forward. I also bring the tutors and the preceptors myself from my previous classes. And I rarely bring the ones who got A’s, I bring the students who came into the class, not quote, unquote, having the background. And then they picked up the background. And they succeeded. And they ended up with a solid B, and sometimes even a C, and I bring those students and we meet on a weekly basis. And so the culture of my class is very much we’re going to work together with the tutors. And then the third thing is I tell the students, we come from different backgrounds. And I use my story that when I started graduate school, my background was in philosophy, and all of a sudden, I am studying neuropharmacology. And many of my peers in graduate school were steps ahead of me. And I was trying to figure out just basic things in cellular neurophysiology, or cellular neuroscience. And so I talk about the notion of some of us have this background and not the other background as a way to celebrate the diversity. And I say the way I’m going to approach this is I am going to start slow, because I want to review for some of you and I want to bring up to speed others, those of you who are going to feel like this is slow, I want you to stick with me. And I want you to think about what’s coming ahead. And then sometimes I’m going to speed up and some of you are going to feel like this is so fast, I also want you to stick with me, I’m going to slow down. So it’s very much relational. I’m telling them what’s going on, I’m working with the tutors, they come and talk with me. At the beginning of the class, I do a lot of exercises where students answer on a form, it’s a one-item form: should I slow down or speed up. So I’m getting this real live feedback, slow down or speed up. I’m not learning anything new, this is overwhelming. And it gives me the opportunity to change and accommodate. No class or no session is going to be the same as the previous one. So those are some of my approaches. Again, be transparent with the student, get to know what they know. focus on not just what they perhaps don’t have academically, but what other assets they bring that perhaps the students that have the academic background don’t bring and celebrate those. Those are also important and constantly seek feedback from your audience.

John: And it sounds like using peers in the classroom to provide feedback and using group projects would be another way of leveraging the strength of all the students so that those who do have better strength in a topic can assist those who are still at an earlier stage of development, which benefits both types of individuals because by explaining it to other students, they’re going to reinforce their own learning and the students who have things explained to them by their peers are going to be able to connect to that in a way they don’t often if we were explaining it to them.

Rebecca: You just kind of talked a lot about some feedback loops that are necessary in learning. And one of the things that you advocate in your book is a process of critical reflection at the end of the term that relies on self examination and engagement with course data. Can you talk a little bit about that process and what data faculty might use to assist in this kind of reflection?

Bryan: I guess for me, I really would like the conversation about how we look at semesters that we teach, to move away from a hyper focus on whether we grade or not grade, or just assess learning. And I’m not saying that assessing learning is not important. But I would like to move away from that and broaden it to evaluating an experience. And that language matters. Because in the latter, by definition, when you’re doing any kind of forensic analysis of an experience, you naturally have to think about all the factors that contribute to whether that experience was successful, however its success is defined for that situation. And the factors include ourselves, the factors includes things we did well or didn’t do well. The factors include the physical environment of the classroom or the virtual environment. The factors include the support structures that were available for both the instructor and student to be their best selves. And so once the conversation broadens in that way, it just by definition necessitates some critical reflection. It really presents the class with that question wrong. It’s probably not them, it might be me. So just things like that. It gets us away from what I think is a little bit of a false dichotomy on that kind of issue. Should you put a ladder or should you not put a ladder, that is what it is, but this is what our section is really asking us to respect. If it’s a humanist process, then every human involved will have some questions to answer about how well it went or didn’t go.

Mays: So teaching, as I mentioned earlier, is very relational. And it’s a work in progress, as learning is. And so the feedback that we see from our students is critical to help us look at what we’re missing, look at assumptions we made, assumptions we didn’t make. It really helps us move forward in a kind, equitable, and liberatory way. So, first of all, we advocate for feedback throughout the semester. Talk with your students, listen to your students. It’s a co-creative process. And then the feedback that we seek at the end, we of course, problematize student evaluation. And we say that, on the one hand, there are so many biases and so many problems with how instructors are not evaluated equitably, especially instructors from racialized backgrounds and women instructors. And at the same time, the feedback is so important, because it is right now, it’s arguably the only source of information we get about students’ experience, not so much about their learning, but about their experience. And that’s really important. We do talk about ways to enhance the reflection, too. So we could get more in-depth information about students’ experiences. And we talk about this idea of reflection, why it is so important. Parker Palmer talks about how we teach who we are, and how our inner being is so critical in the teaching process. And when we reflect on even the most harsh evaluation, what we’re doing is trying to find the truth, find a truth within that, with the intention that this truth can help us grow as teachers, as instructors, as facilitators, as human beings. So it could help our future students. So those are some of the things we talked about that the reflection is so critical, and it’s been written about in bell hooks’ work and Paulo Freire’s work, and certainly Stephen Brookfield and Parker Palmer and Laura Rendon. And those are really important. I hope when I finish a class, that it’s not just my students who are changed, that I change as well, that it is a process where as bell hooks calls it, liberating mutuality, where the classroom, whether it’s online or in person becomes a space where both the instructor and the students are transformed by the end of that experience. So those are just some of the things we underscore in that section of the book.

John: We always end by asking, what’s next?

Bryan: I will say what’s next, for my program in general, is we’ve been keeping our ears to the ground on the political landscape in the US, particularly around the kinds of things that we’ve been writing about over the past several years. And I think one thing the field needs more is we need to continue to have scholarship around these ideas and think critically about how to have education systems that allow everybody to thrive. But I think there also needs to be really well designed communication projects that message this and perhaps ways other than how academia typically messages this, which is through the research process. This is not trying to throw that process out of the water, but I think getting into more storytelling type projects, podcasting, narrative, op ed. So the short answer to you “what next” question is there’ll be more projects like that are coming down the pipeline, because we think that there’s a gap and a real need for that.

Mays: For me, it’s really bringing the wellbeing and mental health to the equity conversations. I think for so long we’ve done equity and inclusive work, kind of like in a vacuum without taking a holistic approach and that exclusion can have a profound impact on our sense of wellbeing or even mental health. I mean research shows just how systematic exclusion and microaggression can impact our cortisol level, for example. In my own work, I’ve been just saying how they intersect mental health and equity and inclusion and justice. And I want to be more intentional to, I guess, bring that to national conversations. What are you doing about mental health? I know you have this and that initiative for equity-minded education. Where does mental health fit in within that?

John: Well, thank you. Your book is a tremendous resource that can be really valuable in helping people build a more equitable classroom environment.

Mays: Thank you for having us.

Rebecca: We appreciate you joining us today.

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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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