Category: inclusion

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.

[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 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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375. UDL, Access, and AI

Posted in access, accessibility, artificial intelligence, disability, edtech, equity, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, learning, pedagogy, teaching, transparency, universal design
January 8, 2025

In November 2024, we moderated a panel at the OLC Accelerate Conference that used the universal design for learning (or UDL) framework to consider the impact generative AI has on equity and access. This episode is the live recording of this session. The panelists were: Liz Norell, Sherri Restauri, and Thomas J. Tobin.

Liz is a political scientist and Associate Director of Instructional Support at the University of Mississippi Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. She is also the author of The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching, which has recently been released as part of the Oklahoma University series on teaching and learning. Sherri is a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Coastal Carolina University, having recently left administration in her role overseeing digital learning and access. She has been working in the field of digital and online learning for 24 years and now runs an educational consulting business to provide support to educational companies and institutions alike throughout the world. Sherri’s research and work focuses on neurodiversity and mental health in higher education, and she has published, as well as presented, extensively on these topics over the years. Tom is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of the forthcoming book, UDL at Scale: Adopting Universal Design for Learning across Higher Education, as well as Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education and several other works related to teaching and learning.

Show Notes

  • Norell, E. A. (2024). The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching (Vol. 3). University of Oklahoma Press.
  • Behling, K. T., & Tobin, T. J. (2018). Reach everyone, teach everyone: Universal design for learning in higher education. West Virginia University Press.
  • LearnWorlds
  • Goblin Tools
  • Warner, J. (2018). Why they can’t write: Killing the five-paragraph essay and other necessities. JHU Press.
  • Maha Bali (2024). Cultivating Critical Literacies. Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. Episode 545. November 21.
  • Canva
  • LUDIA

Transcript

John: In November 2024, we moderated a panel at the OLC Accelerate Conference that used the universal design for learning (or UDL) framework to consider the impact generative AI has on equity and access. This episode is the live recording of this session.

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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: Welcome to “Equity and Access: Artificial Intelligence in Support of Universal Design for Learning – an expert panel.” I’m John Kane, an economist and Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at SUNY Oswego.

Rebecca: I’m Rebecca Mushtare, a designer and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at SUNY Oswego.

John: The widespread adoption and rapid evolution of generative AI tools like ChatGPT In the past two years has sparked many conversations about the impact of AI, as we’ve seen at this conference so far, on many aspects of higher education. This panel, however, will focus on AI’s relationship to accessibility and universal design for learning. Our panelists are Liz Norell, Sherri Restauri, and Thomas J. Tobin. Liz is a political scientist and Associate Director of Instructional Support at the University of Mississippi Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. She is also the author of The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching, which has recently been released as part of the Oklahoma University series on teaching and learning. Sherri is a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Coastal Carolina University, having recently left administration in her role overseeing digital learning and access. She has been working in the field of digital and online learning for 24 years and now runs an educational consulting business to provide support to educational companies and institutions alike throughout the world. Sherri’s research and work focuses on neurodiversity and mental health in higher education, and she has published, as well as presented, extensively on these topics over the years. Tom is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of the forthcoming book, UDL at Scale: Adopting Universal Design for Learning across Higher Education, as well as Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education and several other works related to teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This wouldn’t be a complete episode of Tea for Teaching if we didn’t ask about tea. So today’s teas are: Liz, are you drinking tea? I mean, I already know the answer, but…

Liz: I am drinking two non-conventional teas. You may have heard of them: One is Diet Coke, and the other is water with a little bit of Mio flavoring in it, which I think counts as tea.

Rebecca: Tom?

Tom: I’m drinking a lovely decaf rooibos.

Rebecca: That sounds good. Sherri?

Sherri: So I actually am drinking my favorite iced coffee. I have a salted caramel mocha with me.

Rebecca: Great.

John: And I am drinking a Tea Forte black currant tea.

Rebecca: And I’m back to a good old favorite that I picked up when I was at Epcot yesterday, which is English afternoon tea. Our last segment for today will feature questions from the audience. Because we’re managing two sets of mics, as you can see, one for amplification in the room and one for our recording, we ask that you use the QR code on the screen to submit your questions for the panelists.

John: Technological advancements like touch interfaces and speech recognition were initially developed to provide access for people with disabilities, but now the standard features used by many. Likewise, early AI innovations, such as real-time captioning and transcription services and tools like spelling and grammar software, initially designed in support of accessibility, have been widely accepted and adopted as useful supports for all students. In what ways can instructors use AI tools to efficiently develop accessible digital content or design multiple means of representation or options for interaction? We’ll start with Sherri.

Sherri: Thank you. So I had an opportunity to think about this question in advance, and in my opinion, based on a couple of decades of watching AI come to the forefront, I feel like AI tools themselves are, in their current state, something that provides faculty and students, as well as instructional designers, with the ability to have different perspectives than we would otherwise. I kind of highlighted, and I wanted to go ahead with our questions by highlighting two of my favorite tools that I figured you guys may not have found yet, because we all know what ChatGPT is, but one of the tools that I have evaluated, and I feel like is going to change our world in course development is called LearnWorlds, and I encourage you to take some time to dive into their free 30 day service, because it is amazing. The one that I use most extensively with my students is called Goblin Tools, and both of those tools are ones that, over the last three years, have extensively changed the space of building what is available for us as faculty and helping us if we don’t know anything yet about UDL, it’s actually helping us to create those without having to have too much background knowledge, because UDL is built into the. Central mechanism of how these tools work as AI. So I encourage you to take a look at Goblin Tools and Learn Worlds if you’ve not looked at either of those yet, because they are very interesting, and it will get you kind of started with a tool that was pre built on the foundation of UDL.

Rebecca: Tom?

Tom: Well, the key here is that it used to be up to the designer or the instructor to create and provide the multiple means of engagement, representation, action and expression for the learners, the 3.0 version of the universal design for learning guidelines recognizes that artificial intelligence and other tools now put the ability to create in everyone’s hands. So the verbs changed from provide to design. This acknowledges that we can both give UDL options and teach learners how to recognize and craft their own customized options as well. For example, before large language models came along, if I wanted a text version of a video clip or I wanted to hear it in another language. I had to rely on humans for those transformations. Now I can ask AI tools to create the alternatives I’d like, and then, and this last part is crucial, do a double check with the humans who have the skills to be able to say, yes, that’s accurate and trustworthy,

Rebecca: As noted earlier, AI tools can also help students with grammar and spelling and basic writing and organizational skills. Will these uses of AI allow students and instructors to focus more attention on the development and higher order thinking skills. Liz?

Liz: I just want to say that when I was invited to be on this panel, I thought these people all know a lot more than I do. So when I was thinking about how to answer these questions, I did what I think many of our students might do, and go to ChatGPT and say, like, “give me some thoughts on this.” And I found that to be really helpful to kind of clarify how I want to answer this question about whether AI tools can help us focus more on the higher-order thinking skills. So in response to this question, I would say “yes, and…” because generative AI can create opportunities for us to focus on those higher-order thinking skills, and to do so as educators, we have to invest time and thought into creating assignments and projects that do that, that engage those higher- order thinking skills. And this is something that I’ve tried to make clear to my colleagues when talking about generative AI, both in my discipline of Political Science and with the faculty I work with in our center for teaching. And I’m just going to do a quick nod to the 1992 presidential campaign, because that’s my age, so please don’t take this as any sort of like derisive comment, but it’s the pedagogy, stupid. It’s always been about the pedagogy, and John Warner’s book Why they Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, sort of gets at this in his title, that a five-paragraph essay may not engage those higher-order thinking skills. It’s a formula, and he wrote that book well before ChatGPT was a going concern. So I think we have to do the really hard work of figuring out what an assignment looks like to engage those higher-order thinking skills, and that requires work, not just from our students, but from us, as we work with faculty and do the hard work of education.

Rebecca: Sherri?

Sherri: So, I agree with Liz on her premise that it is really about the pedagogy. It’s always been about the pedagogy. I am in a position now where not only am I teaching at my home institution, but I also teach at a couple of other institutions as needed, and each of them have exceptionally varying policies and restrictions on the use of AI. I won’t name the one that has a restriction, but I will point out that because my work is extensively in students with what we would call hidden disabilities, a lot of times there’s a misunderstanding about the need for AI. AI is absolutely a requirement. And for example, Goblin Tools I use with all of my students who have any kind of learning disability, ADHD, like myself, if they have any kind of mental health concerns, then Goblin Tools is an essential tool for allowing them to bolster their executive functioning. And I’ve had to share that research and share that type of understanding with my colleagues at the institution that has a restricted AI policy that tells students they will fail if they are known to use AI. And I’ve had to tell them that this is an equity issue. It is a requirement for these students to be able to utilize this and there was a presentation two sessions ago, earlier this morning, where they shared that less than 20% of institutions in the United States have college students that disclose a disability. That means we’re missing about 80% of them, and that’s an important fact to keep in mind. They may not tell us they have a disability, but it is important for us to advocate at all of our campuses, that AI actually is allowing individuals who may struggle to do these basic skills of spelling and grammar and outlining without these tools.

John: Students enter our classes with quite a bit of variation in their prior learning experiences, and that can create a lot of challenges for instructors. In thinking about designing outcomes to sustain student effort and persistence. How might AI tools be used to provide enough challenge to individual students and enough individualized support that’s tailored to the needs of each student? Tom?

Tom: Well, beyond just creating multiple formats as materials, and that’s something that large language models and predictive AI do very well, instructors and students alike can use AI tools to create self-quizzing questions about materials and differentiated study pathways based on learners’ own engagements. The most promising access barrier we can lower with AI has to do with customizable study methods that learn about you and help you practice, prepare, engage. Of course, many of us know that the least effective way to study is print out a text and review it with your highlighter marker in hand. The better way is to read and create application and recall questions as you go along, and then after a while, quiz yourself about the materials. Our learners may not yet be experienced in crafting their own self-quizzing questions; they can ask. Ai, not for a summary of the reading that would be doing the work in place of the student, but for questions to ask about the reading that’s augmenting and customizing the study skills of the learners. Liz, you got thoughts on this too, don’t you?

Liz: I do, and something that I don’t hear discussed very often, although, Sherri, I’m glad you brought it up, is that these AI tools can be really helpful to support executive functioning by offloading some of the things that executive functioning is all about. So that can be really helpful for our neurodivergent learners, and also for us if we’re neurodivergent. So for those who struggle to get organized, AI tools can help. If you need to break a project into discrete goals. AI can help if you need to create a schedule or reminders or you want to come up with some ideas to gamify, AI can help with all of those. That’s a really nice affordance of the technology students can take advantage of these tools to help them identify areas where their work might need some strengthening, or provide feedback on where they’ve made mistakes in some of their work, which can help students who might otherwise feel left behind or feel lost to catch up and stay with the class. So just two days ago, I had a study session with my statistics students, and one of them told me, when I get to a question in the homework that I don’t know how to do, I open up ChatGPT. I say, don’t give me the answer, tell me what are the steps to do this question. And that’s a really nice way for them to learn the process and then take those steps and apply them themselves. This is a really smart use of AI tools by a conscientious student trying to learn and improve.

Rebecca: Continuing on with the principle of designing multiple means of engagement, one UDL guideline is to design options for welcoming interests and identities with considerations like providing students with a higher level of autonomy and choice or making sure that learning experiences are meaningful and relevant. What roles do AI tools have in assisting faculty and supporting student identity and interests? Sherri, do you want to start on this one?

Sherri: Absolutely. So I had a different answer for this until yesterday. So I want to tell you that I’m editing on the fly here because I feel like I have utilized the principles of inclusive design and UDL, I’ve built in identity until yesterday, and somebody presented on a wonderful session about how they submit their syllabi into AI with a specific prompt telling them what your background and what your history and what your varied identities are. And it changed my perspective, because I haven’t done that. I’ve been trying, on my own, to tell students I am also neurodivergent. I also come from this background, and I’ve tried to use that to identify with them, but the solution that was presented yesterday was really unique, because they submit their syllabus and they say I come from these five or six identities. Help me make sure that my language in my syllabus is open and inclusive to all identities. That’s a technique I’m now going to be implementing as of yesterday, because I’ve been trying to do this all on my own with thinking of the other identities. But the real value of artificial intelligence… and just allow me to nerd out for a second as a psychologist… is intelligence is just what the general community knows. That’s how we define intelligence. Artificial Intelligence, they know a lot more than us, because it’s big and broad, and it touches every culture and every continent on the entire world. And so from that perspective, I will always get a less biased response from AI, instead of trying to rely on what my own brain can tell me about trying to be open and inclusive of everyone’s identities. So that’s a tip that I’m taking directly from our colleagues from yesterday, of just even starting with a syllabus and saying, “These are my identities, help me make sure that my work is representing all other identities who might be in my class.”

Rebecca: It’s a great example… continuous development, continuous improvement. Liz?

Liz: Yeah, so I want to echo what Sherri said, and just say that one of the uses of AI that I think we often overlook is this idea that it can help us do some reflective practice about our own potential cultural gaps or lived experiences and those of our students. And so if we want to support student identity and interests, we probably need to have at least some fluency with that, or the ability to get that, and especially for many of us who are not the same age and even close to the same age as our students, or for those of us who teach very large classes, this can be very hard. So I would like to suggest that AI tools can help. Sherri, don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent, but I was listening to another podcast episode this morning with a conversation with Maha Bali of the American University in Cairo, and she was talking about the implicit bias that comes from large language models, because they’re reflecting back the text that they have been trained on. And so if you ask these generative AI programs, what is terrorism? or who are the people who are terrorists? It won’t answer. But if you ask it to give you five examples, they’ll all be of a certain kind. And so I think that there are opportunities here as well for students to think about and for us to learn about implicit bias in the culture by doing a critical analysis of the stuff that generative AI gives us. So Bonni Stachowiak talked about asking ChatGPT or some other program to give her a picture of a classroom that was a philosophy class at Harvard, and they were all men, and the women in the class noticed that, the men did not. So these are opportunities for some critical reflection. I also just want to say one more thing, AI tools can be really helpful for our students who are not native English speakers, because they can help them build fluency by parsing text and correcting their own writing.

John: Traditional online assessment techniques such as discussion boards and essay assignments on traditional topics in our disciplines may not align well with the diverse interests and lived experiences of our students. How might AI tools be helpful in designing well scaffolded assignments that better connect to the diverse interests and lived experiences of students, providing them with multiple means of action and expression? We’ll start with Liz.

Liz: So, from instructors’ perspectives, AI tools can help those of us who are subject matter experts and may have a hard time adopting a novice mindset, break down projects into smaller steps so that our students can approach those in a more accessible way. If someone asked me to write a journal article in my discipline, I would know how to do that, soup to nuts, right? No problem. But a sophomore or junior in a class who’s asked to write a term paper may not even know where to get started or what kinds of things will help them get there. So AI tools can help instructors who need some help returning to a novice mindset and understanding what those discrete steps are to create that scaffolding that you mentioned. From the students’ perspectives AI tools work well here, if and when, instructors allow students at least some choice over what the topics of their assignments or projects are, and especially to create assignments in different formats. So be that, video, audio, visual, written, etc. In those cases, AI tools can help students identify topics, refine ideas and then create structures for their eventual work products. That helps the instructors meet the students where they are, and as an instructor, it makes grading those assignments far more interesting, because you’re not reading 100 papers on exactly the same topic. I love getting to know my students through their assignments, and I suspect many others do as well. Tom, I think you have some more thoughts.

Tom: Yeah, to build on what Liz is talking about here, we’re most often engaged in creating assessments of learning: tests, quizzes, papers, exams. AI can help us construct those kinds of things and suggest alternate ways that learners can show those skills. But where I see the greatest potential for artificial intelligence is in thinking about assessment as learning. In our 300-person online lecture courses, they’re a terrible format to begin with… don’t get me started… there are scarce opportunities for engagement and for showing what you know. Designers can craft ways for learners to use artificial intelligence tools, almost like a private tutor. Ask AI to create study flash cards, self-quizzing questions, like we talked about earlier, fill in study guides and the like. The key is to make sure that what the AI produces is good information. Vet the content yourself during the creation process or design in a tech check as a course activity so that the instructional team can assess the quality of the self- assessment materials that AI is generating.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about how AI can facilitate learning, but haven’t yet addressed some of the equity issues in accessing and using AI tools. What barriers might some students face in using AI tools in their online learning experiences? Tom, do you want to start this one?

Tom: Yeah, I can take this one. There’s a lot of ethical considerations to using generative AI tools in online education. I’ll spotlight four of them here. First, we already see the haves and the have nots, the folks who can and can’t afford to use customized targeted data sets and tools. We have customized tools for the C-suite and hallucinations and errors for the rest of us. Second, water and electricity usage… for every image that you ask AI to create of a butterfly, unicorn, kitten flying through space eating a cheeseburger, three liters of water and 10 watts of electricity are consumed. Third, we preach respect for intellectual property, while the most common LLMs and generative AI models have been trained on oceans of copyrighted content without consent. And fourth, and perhaps the biggest barrier for widespread adoption of AI tools for UDL purposes, the high prevalence of racist, sexist, and pornographic inputs to the most general models. Ask AI for an image of a doctor, and it will always create a white, male, older doctor. These are all elements that we should share with learners about the tools that they’re using. That was a bit of a pessimistic turn. Sherri, do you have something different here, or you want to follow in the same way?

Sherri: Mine is going to support what Tom said [LAUGHTER] and actually what Liz brought out earlier. So at one of my universities, because I use AI as a teaching tool in the field of psychology, I actually build into week one and two of our classes how to use AI effectively. And then, after my first semester, because so many of my students love and are familiar with the free tool, Canva, that you might be familiar with, Canva now has a free functionality to generate images. However, Canva is, to date, the single most biased image generator I have ever seen. And as soon as I recognized that when they input things like mental health or ethnic diversity or poverty or crime, that it always provided the same specific images of individuals, then that led me to needing to narrate and modify the way I teach them about which types of AI tools and what to trust, because as future counselors, they do not need to be creating content or using AI’s incorrect LLMs, as Tom and Liz have pointed out, to create a belief instead, that only these individuals are representative. Tom mentioned doctors, and they always have one particular group. In my area, we’re talking about mental health disorders, and it is so, so problematic as a professor to have the student potentially create a presentation that only represents certain ethnicities and certain genders when we’re talking about mental health disorders, when that is incorrect. And Liz, you highlighted this so well, [LAUGHTER] even without knowing what I was going to say, because the intelligence behind AI is growing. It is growing every day. And one of the statistics I wanted to share with you that just came out last month was some of the original developers of AI estimate that AI is in its infant stage, it’s not even a toddler stage, but it currently has an IQ of 160. That’s five points below Albert Einstein, but it’s only a baby, and so once it grows, it, we hope, will become less biased, because it will receive input from us, but it gets its knowledge from us. So if we are inputting biased information, it will continue to output biased information. So it’s only as good as we are good at not being biased about the information that we’re publishing as well. So thinking about that diversity and the equity, I think that we cannot encourage students and we cannot utilize AI ourselves without also making sure we’re teaching them about the inequities. And if they understand the dynamics of how AI is created, its intelligence is based on the fallacy of humans, sometimes are also biased inherently, then they know to be a little bit more conservative about evaluating the quality of the material it presents as well.

Rebecca: So as we move into the audience questions segment, we’d like to remind you that this session is being recorded, and if you’d like to ask the panelists a question, please do so using the Google form that we provided. And we do have some questions in there. Do you want to ask the first one, John?

John: Our first question is from Elizabeth Blythe-Lee, from Arizona State University Online. Her question is: “How do you see AI being used to support personalized learning and supporting UDL? What will that look like?”

Sherri: Alright, I raised my hand so I get to go first. [LAUGHTER] So one of the things that I see it doing… if you guys have ever heard of the concepts of choice boards, or of the idea of student agency, where students have a choice, sometimes it’s difficult for new faculty, new instructional designers, to come up with enough choices to make learning personalized. And so one of the things that I’ve seen happen, whether you’re using the built in AI idea generator or content generator in Pearson or Cengage or LearnWorlds, or any of the ones that are about to come out in our LMS colleagues, they will give you ideas of potential projects that may suit different types of learners. And what I’ve always done in my classes is I’ve created a final project that has allowed students to make a choice: which modality suits your strengths best, pick this modality versus that modality versus that modality, but I can only come up with so many, and so using AI to not only come up with the ideas, but say, “AI come up with these ideas and build the rubric.” It’s a huge time saver for me. And so I already had the ideas about potential projects, but AI has enhanced that and truly made it more personalizable for my students going forward.

Tom: Many of you might know the concept of differentiated instruction, or DI, it started in the K-12 realm, and a lot of us in higher education are doing this as well. It’s very difficult to do differentiated instruction when you’re teaching a lot of people. Differentiated instruction is paying attention to patterns that appear among the learners who are in your class now and then doing design work in how you respond to them. To pay attention to those patterns and respond to those patterns. Universal Design for Learning is what we do before day one of our online courses, it’s how we design, not knowing who’s going to be there, and so we assume that there’s going to be wide variability. Differentiated instruction, on the other hand, is what we do after day one, and artificial intelligence helps us, not only in the proactive design in terms of UDL, how do we give people more on-ramps to get started? How do we give people more representative samples or methods or means for the content? How do we give them more than one way to show what they know? The flip side of the coin is also intriguing. We can design in opportunities to ask students to use artificial intelligence to do personalized, differentiated instruction for themselves, and then share that information with us so we start seeing the patterns more clearly.

Rebecca: Our next question comes from Marcus Popetz from Harmonized Learning. And the question is: “How do you feel about the AI note takers that record the class and offer recall and quiz questions to help the student? Is the note taking and creation of questions the important part, or the quizzing and recall.”

Liz: I appreciate this question a lot. So first of all, I just want to acknowledge that we are having this conversation in a context where being recorded in our classroom can feel unsafe for some instructors and some disciplines. And so I think that there is reasonable concern from faculty when a note taking AI tool might be recording everything they’re saying, getting a transcript and then generating questions. Because many of us feel quite rightly, under increased scrutiny. And so I sympathize with the idea behind this question, that the summarizing and the question generation is an important part of learning, but it may not be as accessible to all students as we would want it to be. And I think to what we’ve been talking about here throughout this panel, is that we want to be accessible to learners at different stages of their learning. And so to say no, you can’t do this, because question generation summarizing is an important skill of learning, might then preclude some students from ever getting to that higher-level thinking. So I’m personally not comfortable with saying no, but to engage in some reflection about what is our resistance, where is it coming from, and how can we think about this in an as inclusive of a way as possible, of different learners?

Sherri: So I was sharing with Tom right before our presentation, that I am doing something for the first time in 24 years of teaching that I never thought I would do. I’m excited to no longer be in administration, but this semester, I’m teaching eight classes, and somehow I’ve survived it. And so I just want to point that out, that in those eight classes, across eight different classes themselves, I may have 60 students with ADA accommodation letters. It’s a lot. It’s grown significantly, and out of those 60 accommodation letters, at least 75% have note taking as a core component of their varied accessibility needs. Again, I want to throw this back to executive function, which, regardless of what type of disorder you have, executive functioning, your ability to pay attention in class and take notes is likely to be impacted if you have any kind of diagnosis, and if you don’t have a diagnosis, and by chance you have trauma in your background, your executive function is also negatively impacted. So you might not have a formal diagnosis, but you need these note taking functionalities, as Liz kindly pointed out, in order to even have a level playing field. So yes, in psychology, we talk about some things that get very uncomfortable, and more than myself, I’m more protective of the other students’ comments and those being shared in the note taking. It’s not myself, it’s what’s being disclosed in our classroom, because these are individuals being trained to become clinicians, and they learn best by sharing their own stories. So I’m protective of it, but in the same way, I want to recognize the fact that it’s important for everybody to see that these are useful tools for individuals who may and may not ever be diagnosed in order to have a level playing field in their learning experience,

John: We have a question from Richard Powers from City Colleges of Chicago, and his question is Beth Stark and Jérémie Rostan developed Ludia, an AI tool that reviews lesson plans, syllabi and other documents through UDL lenses. Reactions have been really good. Do you see educators using specific UDL review tools such as these in the future?

Tom: Yes. [LAUGHTER] No, the Ludia tool is a splendid thing. It was developed just at the end of last year in late 2023 and what the researchers, whom Richard is referring to, what they did was they took a chat bot model and customized it only on a data set of universal design for learning documentation, so if you’re putting in “Hey, I have this challenge, or here’s this barrier, or my students are having these kinds of challenges,“ Ludia will say, “Hey, this sounds like this is the barrier. This sounds like applying this particular checkpoint from the universal design for learning guidelines applies.” And I use the word checkpoint here because it’s still on version 2.0 of the UDL guidelines, they’re working right now to update that to 3.0. I can see that one of the have and have not barriers that is likely to be lowered in the near future is that we’re in the adoption curve with artificial intelligence, where the tools are still designed for expert users. They’re still designed for the coders, the instructional designers. They’re not designed for everyday folks. Here I’m going to hold up my mobile device. Think about every app on your phone. All of those apps started out as something that only people with specific skills and knowledge could use, and they’ve now been designed into things that everyday people can do and use and participate with. So that’s going to happen with artificial intelligence tools as well, and that have/have not divide right now, the people with all the money and the specific business cases they get to train their AI on sort of higher quality or narrower niche kinds of data sets. And Ludia is a wonderful step in that direction because it’s open source and everyone can use it. So good plug for that.

Rebecca: Thanks for your great questions. I know we didn’t get to all of them, but we got to the majority of the ones that came in. So thank you. We always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?” and we’ll start with Liz for this one.

Liz: Okay, I actually want to get some clarification on this question, because I don’t know if “what’s next” means for me or for this topic.

Rebecca: We always leave it on our podcast to be very open. It can be like, I’m gonna go eat lunch..

John: …or I’m going to Disney World…

Rebecca: Yeah, [LAUGHTER] or it can be the big existential question, so it’s really up to you, Liz, or it could be both/and… either/or.

Liz: My particular flavor of neurodivergence is autism, so I just need, like, some clear expectations. So what’s next? I think my relationship to AI continues to evolve. I think when it first came on the scene, I was curious, then I felt overwhelmed, and so I just started saying, “but the environment” to avoid thinking about it very much. Now I’m kind of in this uneasy frenemy sort of relationship with generative AI, where I’m sort of like, “okay, I’m curious, but also kind of skeptical.” So in terms of what’s next, I’m just gonna say our relationship continues to evolve, and I’m not quite sure where it might end up.

Sherri: And from my perspective, I also feel like we’re gonna see some big things happen. My big takeaway that I would love for you to think about is remembering that underneath AI are humans. The intelligence of AI comes from humans. And I think there’s some real value in solving big world problems by the combination of all of our human intelligence together. There’s some major issues that we’ve not been able to solve in medicine and other areas that I think we’re gonna see AI actually give us some solutions for. So keep an eye out for that. And I think it’s dependent on us. It’s not AI that’s solving it. It’s our ideas joining together to find really big world solutions that we can’t find unless everybody puts their information in.

Tom: And if the question is, “what’s next?” we will soon see a diffusion of innovation shift around AI use in UDL practices. We will move from training people how to craft effective prompts to how to use AI tools to shortcut already expert processes.

John: Well, thank you all for joining us. Thank you to our experts on the panel, for providing us with your responses, and thanks to everyone who’s attended. [APPLAUSE]

Sherri: Thank you.

Liz: Safe travels home too.

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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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367. Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT

Posted in edtech, educational technology, equity, feedback, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, personalized learning, professional development, teaching
November 13, 2024

AI tools can help faculty improve the quality of their teaching and assist students. In this episode, Dan Levy and Angela Perez Albertos join us to discuss a variety of ways in which ChatGPT can be used to support learning.

Dan is an economist and a senior lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University where he teaches courses in quantitative methods, policy analysis, and program evaluation. Angela is a graduate of the MPA program in International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she currently serves as a Teaching Fellow. Dan and Angela are the authors of Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT.

Show Notes

  • ChatGPT
  • Levy, Dan (2021) Teaching Effectively with Zoom: A Practical Guide to Engage Your Students and Help Them Learn. 2nd ed. LSC Communications
  • Levy, D. and Angela Pérez Albertos (2024). Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT: A practical guide to creating better learning experiences for your students in less time. LSC Communications
  • TeachFX
  • Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT Companion site

Transcript

John: AI tools can help faculty improve the quality of their teaching and assist students. In this episode, we explore a variety of ways in which ChatGPT can be used to support learning.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Dan Levy and Angela Perez Albertos. Dan is an economist and a senior lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University where he teaches courses in quantitative methods, policy analysis, and program evaluation. Angela is a graduate of the MPA program in International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she currently serves as a Teaching Fellow. Dan and Angela are the authors of Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT. Welcome Angela and welcome back Dan.

Dan: Thank you.

Angela: Thank you so much for having us

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

Dan: Moroccan tea.

Rebecca: That sounds nice.

John: And Angela?

Angela: I am drinking Chai Latin, my favorite.

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca: I have English afternoon tea. It’s been a while since I’ve had that.

John: And I have English breakfast tea.

Rebecca: That’s unusual for you.

John: Yes, it is.

Rebecca: [LAUGHTER] Alright, yeah. We’ve invited you here today to talk about Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT. Can you talk a little bit about how this project got started?

Angela: Well, Dan and I had been working for a while already, when we started talking about this book, and we had been experimenting on different ways to integrate technology for more effective teaching and more effective learning. And I had personally always loved working with Dan, and he had written a book already about Teaching Effectively with Zoom that was very valuable for many educators during the pandemic, and he was thinking about doing something similar for ChatGPT. We saw that many educators were paralyzed by this technology. We saw that many students were already using it, but may not necessarily know the ways in which they could use it best for their learning, and there was just a big need to experiment better with this technology. We started with a small workshop that we did at the Kennedy School that was a massive success, and then from there, we saw there was a big need and a big desire from educators and students to learn more, and so we just decided to go ahead. And I think since then, it’s been a wonderful experience.

John: One of the things we’ve noticed in workshops is that faculty are often a little bit resistant to experiment with ChatGPT or other generative AI tools until they actually try it. So we thought maybe we’d start with that. What are some ways in which generative AI can be used by faculty to help design new courses or improve the design of existing courses.

Dan: I think generative AI can be used by faculty in a number of ways. And just to reinforce your point, John, I think you don’t have a good sense of how useful it can be to you until you actually start using and experimenting. So I think if we could leave faculty with one message today, it would be: “Start experimenting with the technology so you can understand the benefits and the potential limitations.” We can talk about ways in which we can use the technology to, as you said, design new courses or improve the design of existing courses, and I’m sure we’ll be doing it throughout the podcast. In terms of designing new courses, you can do things like help you refine your teaching goals, for example, or you can have it help you as a brainstorming partner in a class that you’re thinking about designing. You can ask it to provide you feedback with material that you’re developing. So there are a number of ways in terms of improving your course. You can ask it for feedback on slides that you have produced in the past. You can ask it to summarize documents, summarize course evaluations, to gather what are the main things that you need to do, but at a super broad level, maybe the way that I think our book tries to crystallize the use of AI, or ChatGPT in particular, is you should think of it in potentially two roles for you. One, it could be a brainstorming partner, a thought partner for you, and the second one, perhaps the most current use, is it could be an assistant. It could be a teaching assistant, a research assistant, a general assistant. So anytime that you are in front of your computer and you’re trying to get something done and you’re feeling stuck, I think you should just ask yourself, is this an activity where maybe spending three minutes with ChatGPT could help me either get unstuck or arrive to an output faster than I could in the absence of it.

Rebecca: I know as an instructor, I’ve used it to get past a blank page, just to get a jump start on something. In the second chapter, you describe ways in which ChatGPT can be used to customize your courses in the interests and needs of your students. Can you talk a little bit about how ChatGPT can create a more student-centered learning environment?

Angela: One of the biggest potentials that the education world has seen in ChatGPT is the opportunity to approach closer to the ideal of one tutor for every student. Research has known for many years that providing personalized learning can have huge impacts in each student’s learning and. And ChatGPT can enable part of that benefit. It’s not perfect, but it can get us closer to that outcome. Now, how can it do it for a professor? I like to think about it in three ways. One is that it allows educators to process the student information that has high volumes. So for example, in every class that I teach, I start by asking students to fill in a form where I ask them about their interests and what they’d like to learn. If with ChatGPT, I can get a summary of those interests and like the profile of my students. The second way is that it provides access to knowledge or to context that allows educators to tailor activities to their specific students. So for example, when Dan and I were updating one of our activities for the statistics class that Dan teaches, we were trying to think of topics that were relevant for the students in the class. And we asked ChatGPT to provide different ideas for topics. And these went from topics related to health to finance to arts, and many of these topics we were not experts in, but they were topics that our students were interested in learning more about. So ChatGPT allowed to tailor our activities and our context to make them more relevant to what our students wanted to learn. And then the third is that ChatGPT can be made as an avenue or as a tool to personalize student learning directly. So we can ask the students to learn about different topics directly on ChatGPT, so that the approach is the one that works best for them. And we’ve seen this in action as well, where, in one of the examples that the book covers, is how one of the courses that Dan was teaching, he asked his students to learn about signal theory, and then you have two students that take a completely different approach. One of them asked for more in-depth and more expert-level explanations, while the other one says, “I have no context about this, so I actually need to understand this as someone that has zero background knowledge,” and that is super powerful. There’s no way that an educator would be able to provide the two explanations in a class to different types of students. So in those ways, I think that the potential is huge.

John: And you mentioned using a form to gather information about students and feeding it into ChatGPT. One of the things you suggest, though, is that you don’t want to include personally identifying information, such as their name or other things. Could you talk a little bit about why it’s important not to do that?

Angela: Absolutely, so there are huge privacy concerns about what data we put in to ChatGPT, because basically, the algorithms are trained on the data that is existing on the internet, and right now, we have no good sense of what openAI is doing with the data that we input into ChatGPT, and so in that sense, we strongly encourage educators to not put any sensitive data, like student contacts, student grades or anything that would make the data that we are adding about the students identifiable. Now there are solutions that openAI is introducing for universities that are available and that we also talk about them in the book, but our general recommendation is to be very, very careful with the type of data that is used in conversations with ChatGPT.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit more about additional ways that faculty could incorporate ChatGPT to improve the active learning in their classrooms?

Dan: So in the book, we describe sort of a simple prompt that you can use, where you give it the slides or the materials that you use in a class a prior year, and you sort of say, “I want to incorporate more active learning into this class. Can you give me a few ideas?” and what ChatGPT would tend to do is provide you with a list of active learning activities. So maybe it would suggest a poll question for your slide number three, or a breakout room kind of activity for slide number seven. The reality is that if you’re just trying to inject a little bit of active learning into a class you’ve already planned, you don’t want to incorporate the 10 ideas that ChatGPT would give you, but it’s enough for you to have one or two good ideas come out of that literally three minute exploration for this to be, I think, worth the effort. I think often we think about, can ChatGPT be better than us?, or can AI be better than us? In the book, we emphasize that’s not the question that you should be asking. The question we suggest you ask is, can I plus ChatGPT be better than I alone? And so in this particular example, you might have a class from the previous year that you’re trying to inject some active learning activities. You ask ChatGPT for a little bit of help, maybe give me five ideas or 10 ideas of active learning that I can incorporate into this particular class. You get one or two that you like, and you might run with them. Or maybe it’s enough of a…not the exact thing that you want to do… but it’s enough of an idea that you can explore. The other interesting thing about AI is that it has infinite patience. So if you don’t like any of the 10 activities that it gave you, you can ask for 10 more, maybe 15 more. And if all you’re looking for is one or two, the spark of an idea might be there. You sort of were describing before, maybe there’s a blank page and I want to get some ideas. The same thing is for injecting active learning into the classroom. One more thing that I want to add is that both in terms of personalized learning and in terms of injecting active learning into our classroom, is that one of the things that has been very interesting is to observe, and I think Angela has been an amazing conduit to be able to see this, is to observe how our students are using ChatGPT, in the absence of us doing anything to use ChatGPT. And so just a couple of quick anecdotes. This happened, actually, after the book. This happened in the last week. So in one of them, I have a student in one of the classes who was hesitant to take the class because the class does require you to run simulations with Microsoft Excel. And he said, “I don’t know Excel. I’m willing to work hard, but I don’t know Excel.” And he, basically in a couple of weeks in the semester, designed simulations with the help of ChatGPT, in a way that he didn’t even think was possible. So to observe how he was able to pursue the curiosity, the intellectual wanting to learn about this and sort of struggle a little bit with ChatGPT: “Can you give me the Excel formula so I can do this?” And so it has been wonderful, and frankly, I couldn’t have spent the hours with him that it took him to do this, to the point that he’s now creating simulations of stuff that we’re doing in the class where we’re not even asking them to do simulations. He came back this week and said, I have created a bot for your course, and I have essentially put the materials from the class, and now I’m asking the bot some questions and getting answers, and that I think it would have been hard to do before. So those are just a couple of the examples of being able to see the students engage in this active learning themselves without us even doing much.

Rebecca: I think that underscores the idea that you suggested earlier, of this infinite patience. I love that idea.

Angela: In the book, we also talk about ChatGPT being empowering, because at the end of the day, it removes the barriers to learning, and so it gives them the encouragement that students need to be able to learn new things by themselves. And of course, critics have sometimes criticized that this only works for motivated students, because you need that motivation to learn to begin with, and that’s absolutely right. But is it not a benefit that at least those that are motivated to learn will be able to do things like this and feel that empowerment, which in turn, is going to feed more into their desire to learn new things?

John: And for those students who come in with a somewhat weaker background, it can help to equalize that background by providing a tutor that never gets tired, for the same reason, that it has infinite patience, and that’s something that human tutors may not have, or their friends, or other people in the class working with them may not have.

Rebecca: Or that lack of judgment.

Dan: There’s an additional benefit, John, to what you just said, which we discovered when interviewing students for the book. It’s not just that it has infinite patience. It’s when we asked the students, what do you see as the advantages of using a bot or just an AI tool to learn, two that came up, one we expected, the other one, in retrospect, we should have expected, but didn’t. The one that we expected is, well, it’s available to me. 24/7, an instructor is not. And the second one, which is very interesting, was summarized by a student who said, I can ask the tools questions that I would be too embarrassed to ask a teacher or a teaching assistant. So it’s not just the infinite patience, which, frankly, a human being won’t have after the third or fourth time that a student says, “I don’t get this.” You might sort of try in seven other ways, but at some point you might have difficulty understanding where they are. Or it’s not even infinite patience, it’s infinite time. You might want to spend time with a student, but you might not be able.

John: And students who may experience some imposter syndrome, perhaps that may help them get past that barrier of asking for help, because they don’t want to reveal what they’re not comfortable with.

Dan: Absolutely.

John: One other thing you talk about is course evaluations, and one thing that most faculty experience is that they may get hundreds of really positive ones and two or three really negative ones, and what they walk away with is a memory of those less positive comments, the negative comments tend to stick a little bit better. You suggest, perhaps using AI tools can help remove some of that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Rebecca: How did you know they stick more, John?

John: I’ve heard rumors, anyway. [LAUGHTER]

Dan: Yeah, so I think you just pointed out one of the advantages of being able to use an AI tool to summarize course evaluations, which is that sometimes what you remember from reading course evaluations is that comment that was either offensive or hurtful or just like, mean, frankly. And what you can do with an AI tool is to just summarize and sort of say, “Give me what are three to four things that students seem to find effective in this course, and give me three or four things that students find ineffective,” which at the end of the day is probably the most important thing you want to learn. And you might even ask the AI tool to give me some specific suggestions for how to improve the course given these evaluations. Now, you might not agree with the suggestions. You might sort of say, “I know students are unsatisfied with this, but I’m not willing to do what ChatGPT is suggesting.” But again, it at least gives you a little bit of a sense of direction. The other thing I would say is that even the mere act of summarizing the themes is something that I think it’s hard for the human mind to do, like if you have 50 or 60 or 100 evaluations to read one after the other, you start thinking about that comment that was either very good or very bad, and you lose a little bit of track of what were the major themes. And so I think those are some of the benefits. I do want to say that I don’t think ChatGPT is as good as having a teaching professional read the evaluations and come to you and have a conversation with you about them. But you might not have such person at your disposal, and even if you did, that person might not be available when you need to do this, or maybe might not be available every semester. So I think there are some advantages of doing it in this way.

Rebecca: It almost seems like a possible benefit of: “Here’s your evaluations, and also here’s the summary.” [LAUGHTER]

Dan: Yeah, well, I think academic institutions should be thinking about doing things like that, where you automate and by the way, we had a meeting two weeks ago with our faculty, and in half an hour, I created a simple bot that our faculty could use to upload their course evaluations, and it gave them sort of the equivalent to what I was just describing. I even added like a little instruction for the bot: take the most favorable quote so you end reading the evaluations with a nice quote from a student. And this is just like half an hour investment in something that could be useful to many faculty members. You could imagine thinking more deliberately about, “Okay, what are the things that we want the faculty to be working on, and how do we design a simple bot to bring those things.”

John: And I think you also suggested that if a department chair or Dean is also reviewing evaluations, this could make it a much more efficient process to summarize them, rather than them having to go through and read them one by one, especially in larger classes or departments.

Dan: Absolutely, I think in general, the ability of AI to both summarize documents and to allow you to interrogate documents really far exceeds the human capacity to do that. So if you have 100 pages of student feedback or course evaluations, there’s no way that you can do it in the speed at which ChatGPT, or an AI tool similar to it, can do it.

Angela: Dan, there may be, like, a useful tip to give here to our listeners, which is, when summarizing student evaluations, it’s always useful to ask for how many people have made comments about a specific theme, because this helps you weight how much the themes that are being brought up are widespread across the students or just a one-off comment for somebody, and that may be something that ChatGPT may not organically. And then the second one is to also split themes between positive and negative, because there are some times that you have a theme, say, like, problem sets are very long, maybe some student makes a positive comment about it because they think that they allow them plenty of time to practice topics in depth, while some other complaints about the workload, right? And so here we comment how interrogating a document may also be a back and forth process where the better questions that we ask, the better the quality of the output that we are going to get from ChatGPT is going to be.

Dan: Absolutely.

Rebecca: One of the other examples that you provide about getting some feedback about teaching is having faculty members record their class audio and then have it transcribe and then ask ChatGPT to evaluate and provide suggestions about their teaching, and then have ChatGPT analyze those recordings and assist with peer evaluation of teaching. Can you talk a little bit about how that feedback might be helpful and maybe perhaps less biased than human feedback on teaching?

Dan: I want to first preface this by saying that this was done by one educator, as we highlight in the book. There are obviously issues of privacy and permissioning that need to be resolved before scaling this, but I think the potential of having an AI tool be able to analyze a class that you teach and provide you with detailed feedback customized to your own teaching philosophy, you can sort of say, here are the teaching principles that I have and that I bring, and I want you to assess what I did relative to those principles, as the educator that we highlighted in the book did, I think is wonderful. Again, comparing with a counterfactual, what would you do if you didn’t have the AI tool? If you had a teaching coach or someone who specializes in teaching and learning, they might be able to see things that the AI tool won’t be able to see. Because they know you, they might be able to give you advice that’s more sort of adjusted to your own needs. But there’s no question in my mind that most of us don’t have access to such a person on a literally daily basis, and so the AI could help scale that feedback, could help complement… Angela and I in the book, talk a lot about how AI can complement things that we tend to do with other human beings, and I think this is one of them. In terms of being less biased, obviously, there’s a lot written about how AI has some built-in biases that goes, I think, beyond the scope of this podcast, but I do think that an AI tool can, if you give it: “Here’s the criteria by which I want you to judge the class that I just gave,” might be able to help you see things that you’re not seeing.” So is it ready for prime time right now? I mean, our educator was super, super innovative in the way that they did it. My sense is that the tools will come so that it’s much easier to do it. And one of the areas that we’re most enthusiastic about is to think about the use of AI inside the classroom, not just to provide feedback after class to a teacher, but how can AI be used inside the classroom to do lots of things? I think that’s a chapter in the book that is a little bit of reflecting experiences from educators, but mostly speculating about future directions. My hope is over the next year or two, we’ll see lots of super interesting uses of AI in the classroom that could help advance our teaching goals.

John: One of the things that people who run teaching centers sometimes note is that faculty will come to them and talk about what they’re doing in classes, and then the feedback they get from more senior people in the department may not always be consistent with evidence-based teaching practice. [LAUGHTER] Of course, that would not happen at our institution, [LAUGHTER] but I think that would be one way in which, while there are biases in AI because it’s trained on human data, it’s at least trained on a very large base of human data, rather than just the perceptions of the one person who’s sitting in observing the class that semester. So it might actually provide somewhat more neutral feedback, again, as long as the prompts are well designed.

Dan: Yeah. And one thing I want to add is that you can literally tell the AI tool, let’s say there’s a book about teaching and learning that you think captures particularly well the evidence and how you would like to teach. You can sort of give that material to the AI tool and say, I want you to use this as a basis for providing the feedback. As a person who teaches and tries to be as helpful as I can to my colleagues when they ask me to observe them teach, one of the challenges that you face when you observe someone else teach is that instead of thinking about, how can I be helpful to this person where they are, it’s almost inevitable you start thinking how you would have done it differently, and that’s probably not the right approach to help someone get better, because whatever you would have done differently might or might not help the learning of the students in that classroom. So I think trained teaching professionals might not have this issue, but if you’re getting feedback from a colleague, again, I don’t think it has to be a substitute. But if you ask yourself, how many times have I had a colleague observe me teach in the last year? I think most of us would reply, not that many. And AI could help scale that feedback and certainly complement.

John: A related note is that when there’s surveys of faculty in terms of how much they use active learning techniques, generally, most faculty report a relatively high level of use, but when students are asked about that, the reported level of use is a bit lower. And perhaps this, again, might be a nice way of getting at some assessment of that that’s independent of the faculty’s self-perceptions.

Dan: Absolutely. Again, I’m not saying that this is happening now, but one very raw measure of how much active learning is happening in your classroom is what percent of the time in your classroom you are speaking. I have had someone measure that in my own classrooms, and I severely underestimate that percentage, I think I speak much less than I do, and so it’s a reality check. But now that plus 100 other statistics about your class, average wait time, how many open-ended questions have you asked? How many times do you say “hmm” when you’re teaching? How much back and forth there’s between students, like a volleyball kind of dynamic rather than ping pong, where they’re always going through you? All of those things which you might have imperfect perceptions of what’s going on. You could imagine an AI tool being able to capture and give you a more realistic sense of what’s happening in your classroom.

John: I believe that there is a tool out there that will record your classes and use AI to give you some feedback. What’s the name of that application?

Dan: The people that I actually know and highly recommend the tool is called TeachFX, and they’re able to do that, and maybe some of the things that I’m describing now they can already do, but if not for sure, they will be close to being able to do. It’s almost like you have a full diagnostic of what happened in your classroom in a way that would be very hard to do otherwise.

Rebecca: So shifting away from teachers thinking about their own teaching and back into the hands of students being in control of some of their own learning, what are some ways that students can use ChatGPT to assist their own learning?

Angela: I love this question, Rebecca, because it’s a big part of the book, and it’s something that was very important for us to reflect. Dan has a very good sentence that he uses when he starts introducing workshop which is, teaching is not the same as learning, and so teaching effectively may not always be the same as learning effectively. So that said, I’d like to start this the answer to this question by highlighting one of the most important principles that we talk about in the book, which is that different uses of AI lead to different degrees of learning. A nd so we strongly believe there’s not such a thing as ChatGPT helps improve learning, or ChatGPT impacts learning negatively. It just depends on how it’s used. So I could give you a range of different uses that students can give to ChatGPT, and we actually talk about six of them in the book. They include things like getting feedback about their answers, which relates to this idea of using ChatGPT as a tutor. They are things like learning about a new topic or finding arguments and counter arguments about a topic. These are basically anything that a student has to do in their schooling process, t here’s a way in which ChatGPT can learn. What I want to give you is this very specific example that we include in the book, and that explains how ChatGPT can be an agent in the active learning process, rather than an agent in making learning passive. And it’s actually an example that I did myself when I was trying to create an essay for one of my philosophy courses. And one way in which I could have gone about this exercise is asking ChatGPT to write the essay for me. And I could have said this topic is about effective altruism, please write an essay of 1000 words with some pros and some cons, and then just submit that essay. That would have, of course, negatively impacted my learning, and it would have been cheating, obviously. But there are many other ways in which I could use ChatGPT for the same task. What I did in particular is I asked ChatGPT to play the role of a philosopher that was very acquainted with Peter Singer, one of the philosophers that was particularly relevant for the topic that I was writing about. And I had a debate, a back and forth debate, with the AI tool while the AI tool was impersonating Peter Singer. And so I threw the AI some arguments, I threw the AI some questions, and then the AI tool would answer me back, and that was incredibly helpful for me. It helped deepen my understanding of the philosophy, it helped me strengthen my arguments, and it overall improved the quality of the essay that I ended up submitting massively. Now it’s very difficult for educators to understand how students are using ChatGPT in the background when they just see the end result, but educators can play a role in encouraging productive use of ChatGPT.

Rebecca: It’s a super fun example. [LAUGHTER]

John: It’s something I’ve encouraged students to do too, to have it play the role of an economist and then ask questions about current policy debates. In particular, I suggested having it play the role of David Ricardo and ask questions about trade barriers in an introductory class. And they enjoyed that, or at least the students who tried that enjoyed it. It wasn’t a required activity, but it was just something I encouraged them to do.

Angela: It’s fascinating. Yes, I agree

John: What are some of your own favorite ways of using ChatGPT.

Angela: I’m using it recently for things related to marketing. I find myself having to create a lot of marketing copy, which is something that falls way out of my comfort zone. And it helps me make my communications more crisp, and it helps me with creativity. I use it a llot to brainstorm ideas where I just say, “Give me 10 different jokes that I could use in starting this email, for example. I find it amazing. It solves my life. It’s my best friend these days. I have been integrated into almost everything I do, and I’ve been finding it particularly helpful for this task.

Dan: Going back to what I said at the beginning, I think of it as a thought partner and as an assistant. As a thought partner, a way of brainstorming lots of things. So it could be teaching related or not teaching related, particularly when thinking about broadening things, I think it can be very helpful. But I want to talk maybe about a use that we haven’t touched on and which I think might be of interest to people, which is that it can be incredibly helpful at doing things that we hate to do with our computers. So for example, the other day, someone sent me a list that, in reality, I would have preferred to have a table, because it really had literally separated by, I’m not even sure, space, double space, sometimes comma, whatever it is. And I just copied and pasted that into ChatGPT and I said, “Give me a table with this.” So anything having to do with formatting, you’re much more likely to be able to do it quickly with ChatGPT or similar AI tool than you would trying to do it manually. So another of those menial things, I know it’s not a big sort of deal to do it, but I basically had to write an expense report for someone who had invited me to do something, and all I had on my computer was a scan of the eight receipts that I had. And one day I said, “Okay, I have to do it.” And so I just dragged the eight receipts to ChatGPT and I said, “Please prepare an expense report with a table in the middle, listing each expense and totaling the expenses” and in three minutes counting the time that I edited that letter afterwards I had the expense report written. I know that’s like a super small sort of thing, but think about a number of things that whenever you find yourself dreading to do something on your computer, you should think of this almost like as an augmented operating system. It’s almost like as an assistant. Normally, when you’re trying to do something in the computer and you need help, you might go to someone and say, “Can you do this for me?” And then you have to wait. Here it’s almost like the assistant is right there in between you and the computer, and able to do lots of things like this, even things like, here’s a printout of a table that I had on a piece of paper, put it on an electronic table, add these two columns. So after you brainstorm if you want things in a different format. The other day I had someone send me a bunch of numbers, and I just copied and pasted and started doing some basic data analysis with ChatGPT. So lots of activities that would normally take you more time are ones that you can do. Those are not very profound uses, but if they save you time so you can go back to your research, your teaching, or anything else, or even fun, that would be great. And then just as a couple of fun uses: one, next time you’re at a restaurant and there’s a dish that looks delicious or that tastes delicious and that you want to have a sense of how it was done, take a picture, upload it to ChatGPT and say, give me a recipe for this dish. I’m sure it’s not going to be as good as the restaurant, but it can literally give you a sense of that. And then nowadays, with audio capability, you can literally have conversations with ChatGPT. You don’t even need to start typing. So all of those things are now possible.

Rebecca: I like the idea of saving dread. That’s good. [LAUGHTER]

Dan: Yes.

Angela: Someone once told me that they took a picture of their fridge in their kitchen and then asked for potential recipes they could cook during that week. So the people really get very creative with what they can do with ChatGPT once they start experimenting

Rebecca: Anything to save a headache, sounds like a good plan.

Angela: Totally.

Dan: Absolutely.

Rebecca: You included a chapter in your book on creating chatbots. Can you talk about some ways that an instructor can use chatbots, either for their own work or for student use?

Dan: I think Rebecca, the distinction you just made now, I think that is a very important one. You can create a chatbot for your own use, or you can create a chatbot for others to use. Others could be your students or any other person that you want. So for your own use, if you think about activities that you’re constantly doing, and you don’t want to write a prompt that has a context every time that you go into ChatGPT, you could have a bot that helps you with this repetitive task. So a simple example would be, suppose that you have a course where you want ChatGPT to help you every class session, you want to upload your slides, and you want ChatGPT to give you feedback. And so you might create a bot where you upload the syllabus of the course, any material of the course that’s relevant for ChatGPT to have as context. And then you have a prompt for the bot that describes the type of feedback that you’d like to receive. Now you could, every time you’re going to teach a class do exactly what I’ve just described, so upload the materials, put the prompt and so on, but without much extra effort you can create a bot that basically allows you to go to it every time, and then instead of having to do all of that from scratch at that moment, you just sort of say, “Alright, here are my slides for tomorrow. Go ahead and give me the feedback,” and so it’s a very efficient way of being able to do tasks that you do often. I would say one important thing, maybe the most important thing that I think Angela and I can say about bots is that they sound like something very hard to do, but they are not. If you already have the basics of how to prompt ChatGPT, creating a bot is not anything extra. There’s no code. It’s English. It basically has two components. You upload files and you write a prompt, and that’s it. You obviously need to test it to make sure that it does what you want and so on. So that’s number one. That’s for the instructor. But you can also create bots for your students or for anyone else. And so there, I think there are interesting opportunities. in the teaching realm. You would upload your syllabus, you will upload a bunch of documents relevant for the course, and then, depending on what you want the bot to do, we have lots of examples in the book about what educators have done. So, for example, our colleagues Sharad Goel and Teddy Svoronos created a bot to answer questions about statistics course and give practice problems for them. We have David Malan from CS 50 created a bot to help answer computer science questions that students often have at different times in the day and at night. So there are many, many different uses. You just have to think about, okay, what are things that I would want my students to have access that maybe I cannot provide that access right now, and it might be a good thing to do. But the bottom line is, this is not rocket science, if you know how to prompt, you know how to build a bot.

John: You also provide a companion site. Could you talk a little bit about what’s on that companion website?

Angela: Many things, but on the topic of creating chatbots, we actually have that same chapter linked for free in our companion site. So as Dan was encouraging educators to just try and give it a go, they can refer to the chapter that is linked in our companion site. A lot of the work that we did with this book was try to demystify AI for people that were not familiar with this technology. So we are not using any particular slang. It’s all conversational English to explain how to use it. In addition to these, we have other resources that, due to the nature of AI and how rapidly it’s changing, we expected them to potentially be out of date soon, and so we have various types of resources linked. One example that we reference on our book and that we feel that people may want to explore in more depth, too, are the same prompts that we included in the book are included in a document that is linked in the site. And we feel this is important, because if anyone is reading the book and they feel that they want to try out something, instead of going to ChatGPT and having to write the prompt from scratch, they can just go to this document, copy and paste and have the prompt ready to go. And then we also include some additional research or additional resources that can be useful for people who are interested in learning more.

Rebecca: One issue that students are definitely concerned about is the effect of generative AI on their job prospects. What types of jobs are most likely to be affected and will the widespread availability of AI assistance reduce the productivity difference between skilled and less skilled workers?

Dan: So, I can see that John was behind this question, because I know he’s an economist, and I’ll be curious to hear your views on this. As part of the job that I do here at the Kennedy School, I started co-teaching a course on generative AI, and we had a session on generative AI and jobs. And so I think the short answer is that I don’t think anyone knows for sure. So people are trying to understand how these tools can be helpful. I find historical evidence about technological breakthroughs to be at least informative, but there are people who say that we’ve never had any technological revolution that was as disruptive as this one. And so those people basically say this time is different. But the one thing I would say is, if you study technological innovation in the past, almost every time, people have said this time is different. [LAUGHTER] So I’m not sure what to make of it. Maybe this time is indeed different, but I think at a super broad level, I think we’re not gonna run out of jobs. I think some jobs will disappear, and some jobs will substantially be augmented by AI, and some new jobs will be created. That’s my best guess as to what will happen. Students who go to college, my sense is that they will probably be in a relatively good position to take advantage of AI. But if I had to give students advice, is to take advantage of the opportunity of being in school to learn how to use AI in a productive manner. I think we tend to sort of think that our students will figure it out quickly, but I do think that there’s ways of using it that can help students learn more effectively and just to work more effectively. Whether it will reduce the gap between skilled and unskilled labor. I think that feels to me that there are different sides of that argument, so I leave that up to you, John, to sort of say in which side you’re in. On the one hand, some people say that it’s substituting cognitive work, and therefore it’s going to reduce the gap; It’s one of the technological innovations that seem to be displacing more of the cognitive work than previous technological innovations. On the other hand, it might be precisely for the skilled labor for which the technological innovation can help increase their productivity.

John: Yeah, it’s really early, as you said, and it’s really hard to guess where this will be heading, but some of the initial studies, I think, have shown that it’s tended to raise the productivity of less skilled workers, or less experienced workers, relative to those of more skilled workers, which could reduce some of those gaps and perhaps narrow some of the pay differentials. And we don’t know in what direction that will go.

Dan: It could.

John: And on a broader level, there’s the whole issue of AI raising productivity of workers, which could result in substantial gains for society. But the question is, how are those gains going to be allocated? Will they show up in the form of higher incomes for everyone? Will it be concentrated among the firms providing AI tools and services, or will these be shared? Could we end up with that 15-hour work week that Keynes predicted way back in the 1930s?

Dan: I’m skeptical that we will end up in the leisure society of 15 hours a week, because one of the people that I follow on this topic is David Autor, a professor at MIT, and he argues, I think convincingly in my view, that we as human beings have an insatiable sort of capacity and demand for new products and services, and I think that’s going to feed the next generation of products and services that we will want to consume. And if you think about occupations that existed at the beginning of the 20th century that no longer exist, and now there are occupations completely new that didn’t exist before. And my sense is that 20 years from now, there will be occupations that we didn’t even think would exist. So my best guess is that it can have a positive effect on productivity and therefore increase in general economic well being, but I don’t think it will increase it to the point where we’re all gonna work less. I suspect that the two of you will work just as hard, even if AI could do half of your job. Maybe you’ll create a second podcast. Maybe you will do some other thing that will keep you occupied. That’s my best guess. But again, this is highly speculative. I don’t really know what’s going to happen.

Rebecca: Dan, I feel like you know John really well. [LAUGHTER]

John: And the work week has been stuck at about 40 hours since the 1940s or so, roughly.

Dan: I do want to sort of at least mention very explicitly that, even though the tenor of this conversation is one that is positive on AI, there are obviously lots of challenges and risks. On the Teaching and Learning realm. Angela already mentioned, but AI can be used in ways that hinder learning, that are not going to help learning if students start using it just to do homework for them instead of with them. So I think there are many, many challenges and risks inside the teaching and learning realm, and there are obviously huge societal level challenges, just to mention a few: misinformation and disinformation, challenges of intellectual property, challenges of jobs that we have just discussed. There are some people who are really worried that, even though, in the long run, we might not lose jobs, the reality is that some jobs will disappear, and so do we have a strong enough safety net to be able to help people transition from one kind of job to the other? And there are obviously existential risk that people talk about, what AI could do if it were out of control… so beyond this podcast. But just to return to the job of an educator. I think if you’re an educator and you’re not using AI, we suggest that you at least experiment to see how it could help you advance your teaching and learning goals, and maybe even try to sort of see how your students are using generative AI, because that would be very instructive in terms of you hinking about how you can use it to stimulate their learning.

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

Angela: For us, the hope is to get our work out there to as many educators as possible that could benefit from it and continue learning, because there’s so many changes that are still going to happen, and so many that we don’t know. So staying open to learning and to exploring how to incorporate this technology for better teaching and better learning.

Dan: I agree with everything that Angela just said. I think for me, I’m fascinated with the potential of generative AI helping us learn. Not just help our students learn, but help us as educators learn. And so to me, it’s like incredible to literally have available 24/7, a resource that I can ask questions and have conversation with in ways that wasn’t possible before. So in terms of what’s next as an educator, I’m very curious to continue this journey. As an educator thinking about our students, I’m just literally fascinated just learning how they are using some of these tools. And if you could do one thing as an educator, maybe create space for them to not just use the tools, but share with you how they’re using it. So it could be something as simple as you build into an assignment, answer this question, and then go into an AI tool, get some feedback, and then tell us how useful the AI tool was for you. And I think you’ll start discovering some really, really interesting uses that, as Angela said before, get closer to fulfill the promise of personalized learning that we have been sort of exploring for many years.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a fun conversation.

Dan: Thank you.

Angela: Thank you so much for having us.

John: Thank you. It’s an exciting topic, and thank you for helping lead people along in learning more about AI and how it can be used.

Dan: Well. Thank you, John and Rebecca, for the work that you do to illuminate us, not just in use of AI, but in so many topics related to teaching and learning, you do a huge service to the teaching and learning community. So thank you very much.

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

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

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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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365. Learning Students’ Names

Posted in attention, cognitive psychology, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, names, teaching
October 30, 2024

Learning students’ names can be a challenging, but important, component of inclusive teaching. In this episode, Michelle Miller joins us to discuss evidence-based strategies for learning students’ names.

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, and Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. Her newest book, A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Students’ Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can will be released in November from the University of Oklahoma Press. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Learning students’ names can be a challenging, but important, component of inclusive teaching. In this episode, we explore evidence-based strategies for learning students’ names.

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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 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 and Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. Her newest book, A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Students’ Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can will be released in November from the University of Oklahoma Press. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education. Welcome back, Michelle.

Michelle: Thanks. It’s great to be here again.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Michelle, are you drinking some tea?

Michelle: I am drinking water.

Rebecca: I think that’s a good way to be spending the afternoon, for sure. How about you, John?

John: I am drinking an oolong tea today.

Rebecca: That sounds nice. John. I just have a standard English breakfast today John.

John: That sounds exciting. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: It’s super exciting in my tea cup today. [LAUGHTER]

John: So we’ve invited you here, Michelle, to talk about your newest book on learning names. Pretty much all professional development workshops and activities emphasize the importance of getting to know your students’ names. Why is learning names and the pronunciation of those names such an important part of inclusive teaching practice.

Michelle: Well, this is something that I think, like you all have probably noticed, as well, you do see this advice over and over again, and it’s especially been prominent and some of the latest, really important works that have been so impactful in inclusive teaching. So there are a lot of facets to that, I think, especially in a diverse society, such as we have here in the United States, names are such a core part of our identity, and it can be such a positive and it’s a little sad, but it’s also unexpected for many of our students that instructors will put forth the effort and attend to things like correct pronunciation. Now the dark side of this is not doing so can be very non-inclusive. So without kind of belaboring it too much, there are lots of unfortunate examples out there where a faculty member decided not to try or say, “Ah, I don’t think I can say that” or repeatedly gets the name or something about the person’s identity wrong over the course of the semester. So that’s a very off putting thing to students. And to me, I also think of this more globally as part of a real shift in mindset or attitude about our teaching in higher education, I know what I came up with was this idea that teaching is so just kind of performative, and it’s almost like there’s this plexiglass wall in between you and the students who are out there, maybe in some dark auditorium. And to the extent that I got any teaching training, that’s really what I was trained in many, many years ago. Now it’s great that we’re seeing more of us in higher education really challenging that and saying, “No, this is a two-way street, teaching is about engaging students and treating them as individuals.” And yet, I think some of those old misconceptions do run deep. So as a way of individuating, really making a compelling way to reach out to students and individually creating a sense of belonging, a great demonstration that you know who I am and that you do care about that when you’re going to use my name and use it correctly, and because of the very real risks we’ve seen when people do get names, unfortunately, quite wrong in their teaching.

Rebecca: I know for me that when I see former students or colleagues out and about, I often recognize them, can remember stories or instances in class, can have a great conversation with them, and often cannot remember their name, [LAUGHTER] but certainly can remember all of this other information about them. Why? Why can I remember their name? [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: Why? Right. And John, I don’t know if you can relate to that. [LAUGHTER] I know that I can. And here’s the funny thing, I love being a cognitive psychologist, because we do deal with these weird, paradoxical things. And I’ll just informally observe, having been in this field for three decades or so, that there really is this tendency to think that it’s just you. We like to compare our insides to other people’s outsides and so on. We don’t see all the mistakes and missteps that go on with other people. But this really does play out in the field of memory, and especially in the area of names. So, I like to say, and I think I observe in this new book, this is something that, if you’re a cognitive psychologist, you will eventually have people come up to you and say, “I have to share something. [LAUGHTER] This is so weird, but I have a hard time with names. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t do it.” And as cognitive psychologists, we kind of go, “Don’t worry, I can actually really reassure you with that, because this is one of the problems that we have a really good handle on.” So I will say that that the book Moon Walking with Einstein that came out a few years back. He’s not a psychologist, but he does a great job of explaining, among a lot of other things in memory, what you’re describing, of like, “Oh my gosh, once it’s the name, why can’t I remember this? But I have this constellation of other memorable facts that I can tap about the person. What’s going on?” And we call this the Baker-baker effect, like Baker with a capital B and baker with a small b. Just going back to this amazing series of studies that were carried out decades ago showing that really, yes, even when you take the same exact word like Baker, if you say, “Oh, here’s Rebecca, and she’s an avid baker,” I’m gonna remember that next week. I might remember that always when I see you, I might say, “Oh, how’s the sourdough coming?” [LAUGHTER] But if I say this is Rebecca Baker, and she likes to crochet in her spare time, all of a sudden, what happens to that word Baker? And without kind of getting too far into the theory of it here on the podcast today, yeah, all of that other knowledge, basically, there’s a lot of redundancy built into that system. One thing triggers another. Like, if I know that somebody is, say, a potter, I can picture them in the studio. I can ask what sorts of things they like to make, say, “Well, where did you learn to do that?” If your name is Potter, that’s very arbitrary, and there’s not a whole lot else we can back it up or support it once you go to retrieve that information. So this set of studies just made incredible waves when it came out. We just were like, “Wow, we actually have a handle on this problem, and it connects to this everyday experience.” So yes, names are uniquely disadvantaged in the process of encoding, storage and retrieval, which means that for most of us, we really do have a difficult time with them.

John: I know a lot of faculty are hesitant about using names because they worry about making mistakes. Is that a very good approach?

Michelle: Well, let me just reassure folks out there that if they’re worried about making mistakes, you’re going to, that will happen. [LAUGHTER] So just right off the bat, that is one of those arenas of life where we have to go, “Yeah, this is just going to mean some awkwardness,” and it might seem easier on the surface, just not to try, say young man in the gray shirt in the third row for the entire semester and figure that’ll all go away, but that does come at a real cost. So professors are worried about making mistakes. In the book, I do give a lot of techniques, of course, to try to get it right the first time, but a lot of this also comes down to getting out ahead of the problem. And again, as part of the process that I lay out, it really does start with forming that habit of, hey, if a name is coming on the scene, if I’m in a social situation, yeah, a lot is going on. If I’m meeting my class for the first time and students are coming up and introducing themselves, there’s a million things going on in my head, but I need to carve out that space and attention to say, Okay, time to really pay attention to this name. And I joke that you’ll mess up. But of course, socially speaking, it’s a lot easier to mess up and get corrected on the first couple of attempts than when it’s already December, the first in the fall semester, and now you’re trying and you’re going back and saying, wait a minute, I’m not sure if I got that. So mistakes can be anticipated. They can be managed. And I really do want to normalize faculty trying, trying anyway.

Rebecca: Are there some particular activities that a faculty member might use in a class to help learn student names and help other students learn each other’s names in class?

Michelle: So fundamentally, I mean, what I like to use to summarize it, it’s maybe not the best mnemonic in the world, but ASAR: attend, say, associate, retrieve. So there’s lots of different ways to take those fundamental aspects of name learning and incorporate them into classrooms. As I was just mentioning, it really does start with attention, like so much in learning, if we’re not immediately alert to and focused on what we’re trying to learn, we’re not going to pick up very much and there’s no tape loop in the head that you can just rewind five minutes back and go, “Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s what she said.” That’s not going to happen. So using students’ names, so saying a name, for lots of psycholinguistic reasons, it’s not enough just to hear the name. And that’s another fallacy that we think that “Oh, she said her name, I’ve got it.” No, you really do need to pronounce it to have the best chance of recall. And association, this is sort of when I always say this, it has parentheses around it, this is sort of the optional step. We learn the little mnemonics like, “Oh, they look like such and such a celebrity with the same name.” And that can work, but it can also be problematic. You don’t have to do that, but definitely retrieving. So that’s part of the saying as well. So say it back immediately. Great comment, Kayla, and then later on, as the individuals walking out, I say, “Have a good weekend, Kayla.” So both of those things, that spaced retrieval, that saying of the name, and immediately having that part switch on, and that habit kick in when she introduces herself for the first time, that can be the basis for a lot of activities. Now I also have a good structured icebreaker that I use, where we go around the room, and I have a way of kind of slowing down the introduction process. There’s a little bit more small talk involved. That gives me time to covertly [LAUGHTER] rehearse, retrieve, and also gives me a nice context to use the names. Then I go back around, and sometimes I can get them all right, and that’s very memorable for students. And I’d like to encourage faculty to think of ways you can use that to then pivot to, say, an early semester or first-day activity. In my research methods class, I might say, “Oh, I actually remembered all your names, or my hypothesis about how I did that. And let’s talk about how to test that.” Look, we’re already designing research in my graduate teaching practicum course. I do it, and then tell them a little bit more about the techniques, and then say, “Okay, let’s introspect about how that made you feel as a student on this first day, versus if I had not done that.” And that gets them in already thinking about the perspective taking that. I think, that is really going to be a good part of their teaching education. Ao lots of different ways, as long as you’ve got those basic building blocks in there.

John: So how could this process scale to larger classes? For those who teach classes that perhaps have hundreds of students in them?

Michelle: And that is an absolutely relevant question, I’ll say, coming from the discipline of psychology, which typically has really high enrollments than others, I can definitely picture faculty saying, “Well, great. This is fabulous if I’m sitting in an eight person seminar, but I teach chemistry, and there’s 200 students out there.” So just kind of arbitrarily saying, well, 75, 100 that’s kind of what I think of when I think big class. This is probably not the place to try a go around the room and I’ll try to memorize everybody’s names at a go. It would just kind of take too long. And I will say that I’ve had a pretty spectacular fail too, and I got a little over my skis and told a class of 70. “I’m going to memorize all your names,” and that was just a bit of overload for me as well. However, there’s some great research out there I reference a lot in the book. Kaitlyn Cooper and colleagues, a fantastic study of name learning and usage in a large stem type foundational course, and there they lean pretty heavily on a technique that I think many of us are familiar with, but maybe haven’t used to its full extent, which is table tents. [LAUGHTER] And I bring in heavy paper card stock, and I dropped a lot of money on some stickers at the Michael’s craft store, just so people can really personalize these, and that makes them more likely to bring them back. And I make it kind of the norm that you’ve got your name and it’s on your desk, and you might think, “Oh, well, that solves the whole issue.” No, you still have to really consciously remember them. And if you’re gonna really go for it, you can be using those tents to, again, kind of mentally rehearse or quiz yourself at any downtime during class. So that research as well, in those large classes, showed that even when less than 100% of the students’ names were actually learned, even a relatively low proportion were learned, that makes an outsized impression on students, so they may have a very positive impression. They may even think that the professor knows their name, when maybe they’re not one of the people who’s known, but it did make a measurable impact. So something is better than nothing. I know as faculty, we don’t always like to go for partial credit or anything less than an A plus, but getting 10%, getting 20%, and maybe upping that percentage with each semester as your skills grow. That’s a really positive trajectory. And in those large classes as well, I try to say, well, the students who I think we all have, who like to come up at the beginning or the end, they’ve got questions. If you’re one of those students, I’m definitely going to know your name. And not exclusively those students, but there too, and this is a big improvement over my very first semesters of teaching, where even those students were hit or miss for me.

Rebecca: So I know that earlier you mentioned some covert rehearsal [LAUGHTER] that you were doing in class. Tell us a little bit more about what you’re doing. What does your process look like in class when you have your classes?

Michelle: Well, I’m definitely using anything that’s what most of us would consider, nice, strong, active learning types of practices. So things like small groups. Well, I’m already circulating, as I think most of us do, to talk to folks, and in that small group too, if I haven’t gotten their name down, I can say, “Oh, and that’s a great point. And what was your name again?” It’s an appropriate area where I can do that, and I’ve got sort of a small, manageable chunk right there. I’ve got maybe three to five students, and maybe when I’m done talking to that one group, like, “oh, okay,” covertly, or maybe I’ll just say, “Okay, let me make sure that I got everybody’s names while I’m over here.” So that’s sort of piggybacking. Classroom assessment techniques… I love to have folks write down a question on the index card at the end of class, and hand it in, for example. And here you go. Here’s a ready made opportunity to look at the card, put the card away, then look up and say, “Oh, thanks, John. Have a great day.” So all those things. Now, I do have a pretty structured icebreaker type of activity as well, as I was kind of referencing. It does involve, what I think is already a very good way of having students introduce each other. This can be too time consuming if it’s more than about 40 people, I find. So students are tasked with groups of two or three. We’re going to go around and introduce not yourself, but your partner. Because if I’m introducing myself, I’m just worrying about what I’m going to say, and then I’m rehashing what I said, instead of paying any attention to anybody else. And so there’s maybe about five minutes where they have a little exchange to get just enough information from their conversation partner to be able to, when their turn comes around, say, “Hey, this is Jean, and she’s a skier, and she’s majoring in sociology.” And then Jean gets to do that for me. And that’s all great, but that gives me just enough time to do that rehearsal where I’m kind of looking around the room, I’m starting at the beginning, okay, whose name was this, whose name was this, and doing that covert rehearsal, and I do some overt rehearsal too, because again, just like with any other small groups, once let’s say a table’s worth of folks have all had their turn. Now’s my time to go around and say, “Thank you so much Jean, thanks so much. Michelle. Hey. Great to hear from you, John,” and so on. So there’s a little bit of overt retrieval and rehearsal, and also that’s how I’m using my few seconds of time [LAUGHTER] in between people and while folks are talking to each other. So yeah, that’s how that can look. And you can either set it up, if you’re really daring, you can say, “I’m going to try to remember everybody’s names.” But here again, you don’t have to do that, even if you just have that introduction. And you think, “Oh, man, I got a little bit lost about midway through the class. I think I maybe only got about two thirds.” Then you don’t go around and try to show off with the whole group. You say, “that was wonderful.” And then you go on to whatever you were going to do. So yeah, that’s how that can look and again, if you’re already doing an icebreaker, you’re already got introductions, why not leverage that to learn names?

John: And while in a large class, you couldn’t do that for the whole class and have everyone introduce themself to the class, one thing that I was just thinking as you said that, is perhaps it could be done where people pair off and then they introduce themselves to another group after that. So at least students get to know the students around them, because in my experience with large classes is that, in general, once students pick a seat that first day, they’re going to be sitting in that same seat for the rest of the semester. So if at least they get to know the people around them, it’s forming a bit of a local community at least. And I think getting them to know each other’s names is kind of helpful, too, in addition to us learning their names,

Michelle: I love that idea of like your little neighborhood, your street, [LAUGHTER] within a larger class and students. I think, would respond to that. It’s a relatable thing, we can kind of laugh about and say, “Yeah, these are your people who you’ll probably be around,” but yeah, here too, they don’t have to memorize 99 names in order to really get a head start on whoever is around them. And that way they can, if they choose to, they can use the names in discussion you’re modeling that. And so I think it takes us in a positive direction.

Rebecca: I know one strategy that I’ve used for pronunciation was to have students record their name slowly… I asked them to do it slowly… and then to provide some sort of way to help with pronunciation. So I provide my own name, and I suggested the way to pronounce my last name with a rhyme with another word, so that people could figure out how to pronounce my name, and then had them do the same thing, and then I could go back to the recordings for the names I was struggling with and that really helped.

Michelle: Yeah, the technology tools are there. And here’s another thing that we can leverage with sometimes not a massive investment of effort, and so that fits into the idea, too, that you have to kind of get it right from the beginning. It’s not the sort of thing where, after the fact, you can go home and fix it. And so new apps and new avenues come along all the time, and I think we do settle on our own favorites and the recording your own name, I think also can help fill in for some of the shortcomings of what are still really useful tools. I mean, there are other tools out there that are databases of the typical pronunciations of names globally. So I’ve leaned on those and found them very helpful. But it always helps to go back to the source, and if the student is pronouncing it themselves, that’s great. So if this can become part of our beginning of semester kind of routine, as it sounds like it has been for you, again, this is going to set us off on a really great path, and will reap benefits for when things get a lot busier later in the semester.

John: You also talk in your book about having students learn pronouns. Is this process for learning pronouns similar or different from the process of learning names?

Michelle: And pretty soon after I got with my editorial team on this book, they made a really compelling case that this was something to cover as well. And I’m being transparent about that, not because I don’t think it’s an important issue, it tremendously is, but again, as the psycholinguistics of memory person, I go, “Oh no, no, that’s a different process,” which in theory, it really, really is. And again, without breaking down the theory in too much detail, here, basically when we use a pronoun that’s the result of sort of an algorithm that our brain is running just really, really quickly. I mean, we’re talking a language production and comprehension operate on a thousandths of a second time frames. It’s incredibly mind blowingly fast, and we’re usually quite accurate at it. So this program is running when you’re putting your sentences together to make sure that all the pieces and parts go together. So instead of retrieving something like “this is Mary Potter” from my long term memory, I’m doing this matching job before that sentence comes out of my vocal track to make sure it all hangs together, verbs and the number agreement and all that, and pronouns are part of that. Now the complication is that those algorithms, which do operate largely out of our conscious awareness and control, they are tapping into long- term memory representations, and in the case of pronouns and gendered pronouns, it’s tapping into my concept of that person’s gender. So it’s not the sort of thing we reflect on every day, but I have to have all of that set up appropriately in my long-term memory. If I don’t have that person’s gender really correctly encoded, whatever that means for me, then those algorithms are going to misfire. That is what’s going to happen. So you’re not set up for failure the way that you are in retrieving proper names. The problems tend to happen at a different point in the process, but the end result is very, very similar. If I’m not correctly gendering an individual in my classes, that is a real affront to their identity, their belonging, and I’m off to a very bad start as far as including them, which is not to say folks who talk about pronouns in other contexts, healthcare and so on, as far as we can tell the available surveys of say, LGBTQ+ youth, there’s some surveys out there and they say trying and correcting yourself is better than just sort of checking out of the whole issue altogether. So you can apologize, you can move on. It’s not the end of the world, but it is a big red flag that something is off about your understanding of that person’s gender identity. So that’s a little bit of what’s going on behind the scenes, challenging, but in a different way, and also something that we can take positive steps to do better, in slightly different ways, but in ways that we can put an effort into it and come up with a better result.

Rebecca: We’ve focused a lot of our conversation around names on verbal communication, but of course, there’s a lot of written communication that we have with students, sometimes in emails, but also we have learning management systems where there’s the ability to do bulk emails, where there’s sometimes the ability to have some personalization and things in those bulk emails as well. I can imagine, maybe, that having some personalization in those bulk emails and things could also be equally as important in creating a sense of inclusion. Can you talk a little bit about that as well?

Michelle: Wow, this is such a good idea. I mean, I’m kind of going, I wish I thought of that before I put the book to press, because that’s another variation on this theme. No, it’s not cognitively the same as standing at a cocktail party and going, “Oh no, what’s this guy’s name?” but that proactive spirit of, I want to make this seem as personal as possible. Now, if it’s done with, say, a bulk emailing program, I mean, here’s the thing, I think that there’s sort of a big group of techniques and usual outcomes that sort of hang together. And it strikes me that this is sort of a part and parcel of that, of these personalization and belongingness interventions that I’ve kind of seen and occasionally tried myself over the years. So I would predict pretty good results with that. I would predict that that is going to be better than an email with no such personalization. And the reasons are because in these other, again, very similar of a piece, kind of interventions where say I send emails saying, “Oh, I noticed your test score improved. Hey, congratulations. And if you need anything, come approach me” or “I noticed that your test score was maybe not all you’d hoped it would be, and here’s some resources.” Students typically report that they know that you didn’t sit down and personally pen that missive to every single person. They know that you did it some kind of batching, or maybe your TA did it, and at the same time they appreciate it. So something does not have to be a handwritten, engraved personal invitation in order to trigger some of those same positive sort of belongingness. So I would say absolutely, and folks out there who might be trying that do some SOTL on it, see what students thought, see what the impacts were, [LAUGHTER] flip a coin and randomly decide. I’d love to read more work on that.

Rebecca: I think the one bummer about some of our LMS’s is that there’s not the ability to insert in a nickname that you know that the student likes to be called, because that would allow us to make those mail merge like things a little more accurate.

Michelle: Right. And I mean, in all serious it’s true. It’s easy to look and say, “Well, I’m teaching in an LMS. There’s a standard picture. Here’s their name.” But yes, we don’t always go by the name that’s with the Registrar and consider the effect on inclusion for a student who’s been repeatedly called one thing when they go by their middle name or a different name altogether. People don’t always look like they’re photographs. So technology is a huge help when we use it to shore up what we’re not good at, but it’s not the answer in and of itself.

John: In terms of names and the connection of names to identity, there’s this thing called a “cocktail party effect” that we talked about actually on an earlier podcast.

Michelle: Yeah.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about the cocktail party effect and why it has that sort of an impact?

Michelle: Oh, gosh, yes. This is one that was discovered so many years ago, and it’s still incredibly relevant in cognitive psychology, we’re still sitting back and going, “Whoa. It’s amazing your brain does this.” So the name itself is kind of a giveaway that it was discovered a long time ago, back when people had things called cocktail parties and got together in person. But really, any time that you’re sitting there and there could be all kinds of background noise, you’re focused on one thing, or maybe your conversation partner, but if your name gets said anywhere in your hearing range, you notice it… which is wild, just sort of on a philosophical level… because it really does mean that we’re processing what we call a pre-attentional level. So there’s like somebody listening in all the time to go, “Oh, hey, is your name mentioned?” And others explain it by saying that your name is at this incredibly low kind of threshold. So it’s sort of on this hair trigger, that it doesn’t need much input to immediately burst through and make it into your conscious awareness. So it absolutely demonstrates the incredible power that your own name acquires. Babies in their first couple months of life, I believe, they start preferentially attending to their own names, and so there is that. You can even duplicate this, as I’ve done in some of my classroom demonstrations, you can duplicate this in vision as well. So it’s also been found that if you’re focused on one area of a visual array, reading one thing or looking for one thing, you filter out everything else. But if I drop your name somewhere on the screen, you’re gonna see it. So yes, your brain treats your name like it’s just gold. It is definitely very, very privileged. And it also shows, I think, the role of attention here. So I’m always banging the drum for attention and the importance for learning and problem solving and just about everything else interesting that we do with our minds and our brains. And so your retentional systems, too, are in on the act going, “Okay, I’m monitoring for this one thing,” so no wonder it makes such a tremendous impact when this faculty member who I just met five minutes ago is actually saying this to me, either in class or on my way out the door. I’m hardwired to notice that, and it’s hardwired to make that impact.

Rebecca: Well, as you know, Michelle, we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Michelle: Well, what’s next is I’m completing a much anticipated sabbatical year, which I’m very, very grateful for having, and what am I going to be working on next? I currently have another book length project out there. I’m a little coy about saying a lot about it, since it’s still at that early stage, but I will say that it’s about attention, and perhaps a little bit of a broader audience that I’ve written for in the past. So stay tuned. Seems like every week somebody publishes a book about attention, but this one has been a long time in the making, and I think I do have a unique perspective, which I think will appeal to perhaps a lot of folks who listen to this podcast. So I’ve got that… running a few other research studies on everything from flash cards to metacognition, and as we do on sabbatical, hoping to get a few of those wrapped up and out the door.

Rebecca: Well, I know we’ll be paying attention, [LAUGHTER] Michelle.

John: Yes, we will focus our attention, and we’re hoping to talk to you about this new project whenever you’re ready to discuss it.

Michelle: Ah, thanks so much.

Rebecca: Thanks, Michelle,

John: Thank you. Michelle, it’s great talking to you always.

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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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363. Autonomy Supportive Teaching

Posted in classroom community, engagement, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, pedagogy, teaching
October 16, 2024

Faculty have reported a decline in student engagement during the last few years. In this episode, Jed Locquiao joins us to discuss how the use of autonomy-supportive teaching can increase student motivation and engagement. Jed is an Assistant Professor in the Curriculum and Instruction Department here at SUNY Oswego.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Faculty have reported a decline in student engagement during the last few years. In this episode, we discuss how the use of autonomy-supportive teaching can increase student motivation and engagement.

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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 Jed Locquiao. Jed is an Assistant Professor in the Curriculum and Instruction Department here at SUNY Oswego. Welcome, Jed.

Jed: Hi, thanks for having me.

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

Jed: I am. I’ve got a classic, blueberry green tea.

Rebecca: It smells good because we’re actually all recording together in person, which we don’t get to do very often, which is really nice.

John: And I have a spring cherry green tea.

Rebecca: Always a good choice, for some… little known fact, I hate cherry tea.

John: But I have a lot of her old cherry tea now in the office.

Jed: A win.

Rebecca: A win for John, a win for me. [LAUGHTER] I have a good old fashioned Scottish afternoon tea.

John: Very good.

Rebecca: An old favorite, on a day when things [LAUGHTER] aren’t going right, you got to go back to the basics.

Jed: And here a pocket of ignorance on my part. What would that be? A Scottish….

Rebecca: Just, it’s called a Scottish afternoon tea.

Jed: Oh, okay.

Rebecca: a strong tea. [LAUGHTER]

Jed: Okay.

John: We’ve invited you here today to talk about how you have incorporated autonomy-supportive instruction into your classes. First, though, could you define what is meant by autonomy-supportive instruction?

Jed: Thanks for inviting me, John. But yeah, let’s talk operating terms first. So autonomy supportive instruction, it’s behaviors that are often done by a person in authority, in this case, a teacher, where they take on the perspective of someone under their charge, their supervision, in this case, the student, and reduces the extent of demands, of coercion of “you must do” prompts on that particular someone as they go about doing tasks to the maximum extent possible. Autonomy-supportive teaching, then, refers to instructional moves that are student focused from a position of curiosity rather than judgment, and are responsive to students as they engage in those learning tasks just in time. So as they see that students are flatlining, they do something about it. As students have questions, they do something about it. As students seem to be kind of trailing off, not necessarily engaged, they do something about it. It’s being responsive to the students as they are.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what research says about the benefits resulting from autonomy-supportive teaching?

Jed: That’s a great question. So, with our best empirical evidence, the research points to three major things at the student level, consequences for students and for instructors themselves. For students, autonomy-supportive instruction increases raw achievement. They found that there’s correlative studies that, surprisingly enough, students who feel like they have more choice, more control, more sense of ownership, which are all facets of this thing called autonomy, they tend to do better in schools. Now you might be wondering, what’s the mechanism underneath this, and I think we’ll talk about it later, but it’s motivation. We tend to start and stick with things more when we feel that there’s some sort of personal significance attached to it, when we assign meaning to it, or when it’s just fun, which are both elements of this thing called intrinsic motivation. So at the student level, broad treatment, we also have evidence that speaks to this idea that autonomy increases teacher-student rapport. Students above and beyond say that, hey, this class where the teacher gives me a little bit more choice, a little bit more opportunity to assign meaning, they tend to respond favorably to those teachers. They tend to see them as belonging more in their camp, rather than this us-versus-them sort of relationship. At a teacher level, self efficacy. A lot of teachers who engage in more of these autonomy-supportive instruction feel more competent. They feel that they’re more ready, more prepared to anticipate students, to plan and also to interact and react to students as they are as well. And they also just feel more positive about their teaching craft. Rather than going in and feeling like there’s a cudgel, this sort of pressure bearing down on them, they feel actually a little bit more positive, more ready to take on the day and from one faculty member to another, you know, it’s that sort of switch between, “Oh, I have to go back to work,” versus “Oh, I get to go back to work.” And we have studies that speak to that as well.

John: So you mentioned that this can improve student motivation, and tied that to intrinsic motivation. Could you talk a little bit more about how intrinsic motivation comes into play when you’re engaged in this type of instruction?

Jed: So this autonomy supportive instruction is by and large influenced by this framework called self-determination theory, by Ryan and Deci way back when. And there’s a bunch of mini-theories around it, but the big one was they were trying to figure out, why do some people start and stick with things without clear cut instrumental reward or benefit? Why do people pursue hobbies? Why do people stick with activities where they fail time and time again? I’m gonna draw from my own experience. Why do you keep skiing when you fall face first? What is the mechanism that explains that? There’s no clear cut reward. So they found out over the course of decades of research that, oh, there’s this thing called intrinsic motivation, and what it is is when you’re doing things out of pure fun, interest, and a sense of mastery, that satisfaction of doing things for the sake of doing it. They also found out that there’s other types of motivation called extrinsic, and I don’t want to get all technical here, but extrinsic motivation is on a continuum as well. And on one end, you’re doing things because you’re going to get something. You’re either going to get a grade, you’re either going to get approval from your teacher. And on the other end, you’re doing it because it’s important. It’s a part of who you are. I study because I am a studious sort of student, or I’m the person who will stay up late because I’m the person who won’t let my friends, my groupmates, down, that kind of thing. And what we found is those, and it’s called autonomously regulated motivations, intrinsic and something called identified, those types of motivations, above and beyond, predict robust, optimal, enduring activities. That also translates to learning as well. The students who have somehow managed to get it sooner than later that if I assign personal meaning to this task, if it’s inherently interesting to me, if it’s important to me, or the students who say this is just fun, they tend to do really well, whatever the task is, in work, in life, in leisure, in studying and learning as well. So the reason why we care about the relationship here between autonomy and intrinsic motivation is this, autonomy is one of the nutrients, one of their major claims with this theory is autonomy is one of three major psychological nutrients that are the conditions to those more autonomous motivations. And it would be autonomy, a sense of competency, and connection with others. And of the three, they found that autonomy has the most outsized influence above and beyond.

Rebecca: So, one of the things that I think is often really interesting when we’re interviewing our colleagues is to find out, if we were to go into your classroom, Jed, what would it look like when you are acting in this way, when you’re really incorporating these techniques into your teaching? What does it look like?

Jed: I think we can look at autonomy-supportive instructional practice, or ASI from a planning level and a very moment of instruction level. So at the planning level, I, as much as possible, try to embed choice. If there’s one takeaway, if there’s one major practice or instructional move that you can embed in your practice, it’s choice, choice, choice, choice, choice. And what does that look like? Well, at the planning stage, we have several projects. One of them is a weekly assignment. I think everyone here does a weekly sort of assignment, a check in, an exit ticket, an exit slip. For this exit ticket, what I have is the students can work by themselves, with a partner in groups. They can choose one of 10 different options, modalities, to submit it. It could be your classic exit ticket. It could be a Venn diagram, a graphic organizer. It could be a report. It could be a recording. And then even at the end of all that, they have the option to just tell me if none of those fit, and they can make their own option going forth. So I try to embed choice, or I strive to embed choice at the planning stage, where they have many different means and options to submit assignments. And a big part of our work is also grading assignments on time. I’ve embedded choice in my classes, where they have 24 hours near the end of the semester to submit outstanding items. Now I recognize that poses a lot of [LAUGHTER] risk for me as the instructor, but what I find is, if you give students flexibility for time, they make good on it and they treasure that, they don’t abuse it. At least that’s what I found, knock on wood, so far. So there’s that. At the planning stage asking yourself, “How many opportunities can you embed choice> a sense of ownership?” Oh, yeah. And the prompts themselves and the assignments, I have a list of criteria for the students to address, but after that, it’s really up to them to make sense and to translate those criteria. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, one of the assignments that I have in my class is that they talk about a student and their characteristics and what that means for their instructional practices. That’s it. That’s the criteria. And they can choose any form. They can choose any sort of approach to that. It could be a case study, it could be a mock midterm test. It could be a whole host of different things to speak to that particular prompt. Now, in terms of in-class instruction, I think one of the major moves, instructional moves, that was mentioned by these folks who have researched this, is to verbalize to explain your rationale for why you’re doing things. A big chunk of autonomy is making it meaningful to yourself. And I think we presume that our students know why things are important to begin with. It would help for them to hear an expert other explain why they’re doing a skill, why they’re reviewing a session in the PowerPoint, or why they’re submitting a certain assignment over another. So over the course of my lectures, if you were to stand there as a fly, or whatever a fly does in a class, you’d see me explaining my thinking out loud, verbalizing it. I find myself like, “Am I over talking, or am I over explaining?” But no, no, no, I need to remind myself that us, as a professor, we know a lot more than they do, and it would help for them to hear an expert’s take. We’re going from this topic to this topic because we need to get a handle on this before we proceed any further. Those sort of language statements or, “Hey, you might be wondering where we are at right now. Why are we talking about this? Let me explain to you why this is important.” So the first one major instructional move is to engage in those explanatory rationales. And another major principle that is also shared among scholars, among researchers in this is to use Invitational language, and that could mean stuff like, “I get that this is confusing, and I know why it might be confusing, and let’s talk about that right now.” Or “I totally understand.” Or, “Hey, if this is at all boring to you, or if this doesn’t seem important to you, please share it.” It’s this idea of engaging in Invitational language as well, because the goal is to support internalization, where a student is probably paying attention to the lecture because they must, they have to, and engaging in the sort of language to push that from consequence to “hey, I think there’s something more important to this particular unit, this discussion point,” but yeah, so we can see, at least in my classes, you can see autonomy, supportive instruction at the planning stage a nd at the very moment of instruction stage, embedding choice and inviting the students to take ownership when it’s confusing for them, when they would want more clarification, or when it just seems like it’s not at all important.

John: When I was reading about autonomy-supportive instruction, much of it struck me as things that are talked about in other areas, such as inclusive teaching, the transparency and learning and teaching approach of Mary-Ann Winkelmes, as well as the UDL approach. But what I found distinctive about that was a focus is entirely on giving the student that motivation and the other things are brought in as support. Is that what’s most important about this approach, that sort of focus?

Jed: That’s a great connection, John. Well, let’s take UDL. UDL is about anticipating and designing instruction to the maximum extent possible so it fits everyone. I think we forget in our discussions of UDL, of this crucial piece of motivation. You could set everything up for success for a student, but if they come into that learning activity without any sort of push compulsion to even start it, then there’s no point in like the scaffolding. All the scaffolding in the world is there, but they won’t necessarily enter the space of using it. Motivation is a key piece of that. Because I think if you were to ask any instructor right now, just do a random sample, what’s the biggest issue? It’s disengagement, which is a major issue of motivation. So yeah, absolutely, there’s a connection here. UDL talks about meeting everyone where they’re at. Motivation, saying, all right, you got to meet people at that spark. And crucially, it’s not just a spark, it’s how do you maintain it? How do you keep them engaged? How do you keep them going on despite setback, and the research on motivation helps fill in that gap, I think.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what research indicates about whether or not participating in professional development on autonomy-supportive instruction has persistent, long-term effects on instruction?

Jed: Like with any teaching skill, it can be learned, but it requires serious self reflection on our part, and a serious commitment to it. And why do I say that? Because a lot of us, when we start out new at this teaching craft of ours, we teach how we learned, and a good chunk of how we learned was through something called the controlling style of teaching, and where, rather than Invitational language, rather than giving choice, rather than the whole set of seven principles associated with this thing called ASI, we tend to try to present coercion, or we try to use demands. We try to tell a person that this is the way that this must be thought and said, and this is the only way of doing things, “my way or the highway” sort of instruction. So it’s hard to break habit. That’s what I’m trying to get at, because we do teach the way we were taught, but thankfully, we have research that speaks to this idea that when you try to change one thing in your practice, even just one thing, something where you say, I’m going to try to give the students more choice in this way, in this assignment… it’s a low-stakes assignment, I’m going to give them choice. We find that once you start that small practice, it tends to go into your other practices. It’s doable. Autonomy-supportive instruction is a skill that we can pick up. I initially taught the way I learned, which was through that controlling style, but I realized that, okay, I want to try relinquishing. So I started out giving options for those exit tickets, low-stakes stuff, and then I started applying it to the bigger stakes assignments as well. And then I started messing around with the assignment expectations, the submission expectations, too. Maybe they don’t have to submit everything week by week. Maybe I can give them two freebies. And I’ve told the students that they can use those freebies strategically, giving them more choice, in recognition that sometimes life happens. Life will happen a lot, and maybe they’re going to be busy during midterm weeks as well. Maybe save it for them. You have choice. You have choice. It was once a little trickle of trying to embed more opportunities, using more Invitational language, giving students more authority of what to do with their time. I’ve actually been telling the students, “Hey, all the readings and artifacts are speaking to the same Idea for that week. You choose your mileage. You choose… make it make sense for you. And I find that the students have responded to that. They seem to be more engaged. Of course, I don’t have hard data on that, but the course eval seem to suggest otherwise. The exit tickets that they speak to seem to suggest so too. But long story short, it’s doable, and I can only point to myself and to the evidence here that other people have said it seems to be malleable, that when you change one thing of your practice to be more autonomy supporting it tends to trickle.

John: I was impressed by the research that suggested that when people did attend professional development on it, that they tended to persist in the practice, which doesn’t always happen, because quite often people will try something. It may work well, but then it will gradually fade out and people revert to their past practice. So it sounds as if this approach is something that the instructors themselves tend to value in terms of being a more enjoyable teaching experience.

Jed: Thanks for bringing that up, John. I want to believe, I want to say, that if you were to walk into our classrooms, or the classrooms that I’ve had the privilege of teaching the past couple years, that they’re loud, that the students are looking at each other eye to eye, that they’re asking questions, raising their hand and asking for follow up over the course of a lecture. Now I can’t guarantee their reading necessarily, but they seem to be coming to class a little bit more engaged than not, and to me, that’s a win. But yeah, I think I can only speak to my own experience here, where, if it weren’t for this, I think I still would be engaging in a very controlling style. I’m so grateful that I just bumped into this particular framework, because when I was starting out, my first teaching assignment was online classes. It was COVID and I was racking my head. How do you reach students? And consistently, the empirical evidence said, you gotta spark their motivation. You gotta attend to motivation. It doesn’t matter if you have the best content. It doesn’t matter if you have the best exercises. They need to get their foot in the door and stay. They need to close the door after them. And motivation was it, especially the work of Ryan and Deci.

Rebecca: So what advice would you give someone who wants to take their first steps in this direction and implement autonomy-supportive teaching?

Jed: Start small, start really small here, and choose one principle at a time for a semester to work on. The practices won’t go away anywhere, because as a faculty member, you have to be everywhere and be everything, but the practices will always be there. So choose one. Choose one. Start small. And I’d encourage you to look at choice, choice, choice, choice at the assignment stage, choice in what I need to do, to show that I’ve done the work and to demonstrate learning. Choice in that way. Choice in submitting that assignment as well, choice and engaging in class. Does a person have to raise their hand? Does the person have to respond by themselves? Could they respond in a group? Could they defer for a later time, like, if they don’t respond this time around, could they be compelled to answer the next time around? That kind of stuff. Do they have to respond in this particular session? That kind of stuff is just giving the students more choice, and then as you do that, the levels of choice, they can get bigger. Like, the stakes could be bigger. Like, do we want to cover this topic right now? The choice could start to trickle and take on different levels of trust between you and the student. You’re asking them to take ownership of their learning. And that oftentimes means saying, ‘Hey, did this make sense? Did our entire last week make sense? Do we want to go back and review it?” It’s increasing the levels of choice for our students, and it starts with that. Just maybe we can give them more options here at this level.

John: Is it possible to go a little too far and give students too much choice? Is it important to maintain some type of structure, because if you just leave it completely up to the students, might things break down and you might lose some of the effect of your expertise, perhaps.

Jed: Oh yeah, what a great, valid question. [LAUGHTER] We’re speaking of this idea of laissez-faire teaching. I don’t think we need to draw too far deep into our memories of a terrible teaching moment where we felt that the instructor was checked out, and if you were to say, “Hey, I need this,” they’d just keep doing on the same thing. I think that’s a major distinction to make. Giving folks more choice is not the same as not paying attention, not responding just in time and going as is. That idea of laissez-faire teaching is just moving on and keeping on. There is an element of seeking more knowledge about the student and responding to this just in time. That’s the first major definition of autonomy-supportive instruction, being present, doing something about it. Now, in terms of professional expertise as the instructor, yeah, we’re there. We have to have guardrails, absolutely but I think the ask is this, are some of our guardrails arbitrary, like submitting things at a certain date? How much of that is crucial to the discipline, the subject? Do we have to use this particular mode, which speaks to UDL? Does our content depend on a midterm exam? Does the sanctity of our subject depend on a five-page essay. That’s what this is saying. Like, can we tether between the extreme of “it must be this way forever” versus “Yeah, sure, whatever. I don’t care.” I think that’s the ask here. With autonomy-supportive instruction is to thread the needle between both extremes and say, “I think we can give you a bit more options for accountability, for ownership, and just really to make this your own.” And how can we embed more of this? It’s asking the students to relate it back to their lives. If you’re a fly in a classroom that embeds this, it’s embedding it and making it more personally relevant for the students and professionally relevant, because you’re trying to support this thing called internalization, assigning significance and importance. But yeah, there is always going to be a place and an expectation for the professional to say, “Yep, here is the limits.” And we got to have some limits here. Absolutely. They ask us how much of those limits are arbitrary.

Rebecca: Structure is really important when there’s choice.

Jed: And as a special education teacher, you gotta have structure. Yeah.

John: It reminds me of something that Kevin Gannon has said in the past about the difference between logistical rigor and cognitive rigor, that we want classes to be challenging, but challenges in terms of the cognitive effort of learning the material, not in terms of arbitrary rules and procedures that do not add to the learning.

Jed: That’s the connection. Yeah. It’s asking yourselves, alright, is this 100% absolutely necessary?

Rebecca: How have students responded?

Jed: Yeah. So in class at the very moment I just came from a class that, and that’s this, their eyes were, I’m looking for all the tells of engagement when I’d ask a question, first time told they respond first time told. When I say “Hey, I want you to take the next few moments to review this artifact in the middle of class,” I see them whip open their books and start clicking and clacking their keys. So the tells seem to suggest that these practices work. One of the exit tickets, I’ll just share this with you. In the first week, they’re asked what’s working for you? What’s not working? And one student said this, “Wow, I have never had so many options before. I am really grateful to have options, and I cannot believe that this is the first class I’ve had where I’ve had these many options.” And it’s not one of those things where it’s like, yeah, sure, pat yourself on the back. But I think it’s one of those things where, alright, here’s a student for whom this seems to resonate for them, and it seems to be a fit for them. And a lot of students, over the course of several sections, seem to be saying the same thing. So straight from the students, straight from the source, it seems to resonate for them, this thing called autonomy-supportive instruction in terms of their achievement, because at the end of the day, this is what we’re about. We want the students to do well. We want them to flourish. I’ve found that no matter what the form, no matter what the approach, the students attend to those rubric criteria. They address them with diligence. They address them with care. And I found that, knock on wood, I haven’t had a serious situation yet in my course sections where you give students choice, they take it. They don’t abuse it. Yet. Keywords as well for student reactions, I had in my notes: shock, relief, and appreciation, and I get minimal-end-of semester grading issues so far. But I have to say, though, the stuff like the 24-hours revise and resubmit, that can get really, really unwieldy too, but rare.

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

Jed: Sure, Bev’s ice cream, chocolate, vanilla, medium, I’m thinking, it’s a hot day [LAUGHTER] and it’s a beautiful day, so I’m thinking ice cream.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again, and we’ll talk to you again in the future. I’m sure.

Jed: It’s a privilege. Thank you so much.

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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362. Teaching Digital Storytelling

Posted in active learning, authentic learning, collaborative learning, critical thinking, engagement, equity, higher education, inclusion, information literacy, international collaboration, learning, metaliteracy, online learning, open pedagogy, pedagogy, storytelling, teaching
October 9, 2024

Digital storytelling provides students the opportunity to bring their lived experiences into the classroom as creators rather than consumers of knowledge. In this episode, Tom Mackey and Sheila Aird join us to discuss ways digital storytelling can be used to increase student information literacy, critical thinking skills, and to support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Tom is a Professor of Arts and Media and Program Coordinator for the BA and BS degrees in Digital Media Arts at SUNY Empire State University. He is the recipient of a 2022 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities and the recipient of several other awards for his teaching and mentoring work. Tom is also the co-author of several books and two MOOCs that focus on metaliteracy. Sheila is an Associate Professor and European Director of International Programs at SUNY’s Empire State University in Prague, in the Czech Republic. Her work broadly focuses on cultural history and public scholarship with a particular focus on  public history, pop culture, children of colonial enslavement, and issues of race in the African Diaspora community. Sheila has presented her work in many domestic and international venues and has co-authored two papers with Tom. Sheila and Tom are the co-editors of the new book, Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices through Online Narratives, published in 2024 by Rowman and Littlefield. They also co-authored the framing chapter for this volume based on their collaborative development and teaching of Digital Storytelling as a virtual exchange between SUNY Empire students studying in Prague and the United States.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Digital storytelling provides students the opportunity to bring their lived experiences into the classroom as creators rather than consumers of knowledge. In this episode, we discuss ways digital storytelling can be used to increase student information literacy, critical thinking skills, and to support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guests today are Tom Mackey and Sheila Aird. Tom is a Professor of Arts and Media and Program Coordinator for the BA and BS degrees in Digital Media Arts at SUNY Empire State University. He is the recipient of a 2022 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities and the recipient of several other awards for his teaching and mentoring work. Tom is also the co-author of several books and two MOOCs that focus on metaliteracy. Sheila is an Associate Professor and European Director of International Programs at SUNY’s Empire State University in Prague, in the Czech Republic. Her work broadly focuses on cultural history and public scholarship with a particular focus on public history, pop culture, children of colonial enslavement, and issues of race in the African Diaspora community. Sheila has presented her work in many domestic and international venues and has co-authored two papers with Tom. Sheila and Tom are the co-editors of the new book, Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices through Online Narratives, published in 2024 by Rowman and Littlefield. They also co-authored the framing chapter for this volume based on their collaborative development and teaching of Digital Storytelling as a virtual exchange between SUNY Empire students studying in Prague and the United States. Welcome Sheila, and welcome back, Tom.

Sheila: Thank you.

Tom: Thanks so much. So happy to be here. Appreciate the interest in our new book.

Sheila: Absolutely.

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

Tom: I sure am. So, I’m drinking Celestial Seasonings Tangerine Orange, Zinger.

Rebecca: Nice. And how about you, Sheila?

Sheila: I am drinking hibiscus tea in a Starbucks cup, but that’s okay.

John: And I am drinking lady gray tea in a SUNY- Oswego School of Education mug, which was given to us when we moved into this new recording space by the dean of the school.

Sheila: Nice.

Tom: Great.

Rebecca: We’re enjoying our nice space here, for sure, and I have a nice cup of Hunan jig, which I brewed this morning.

Sheila: Great.

Tom: That’s great.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your new book. But first, could you talk a little bit about what a digital story is? How would you define this?

Tom: Well, the idea of a digital story is that anyone with access to digital resources can really write, plan and produce their own personal narratives. So this is an idea that’s been around now for, I would say, a few decades, and there’s been a lot of interest in this, but it really is about being able to tell your story using digital technologies. And the idea, too, is that you don’t have to have the most expensive tools to do that, these could be freely available tools that are online, and, again, really empower people to tell their story.

Sheila: Absolutely, and as Tom said, today, since we’re so technologically connected, anyone with a cell phone, and we know that through some of the things that are coming through social media and people creating narratives and developing narratives, but in this particular instance, this is about teaching students how to not only use their cell phones, but introducing them to free and different editing software and going through steps in order to come out with a finished product.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how your book, Teaching Digital Storytelling, came to be?

Sheila: The back story is Tom and I both were teaching digital storytelling in our own sections. While in Europe, we came up with the idea to bring the students that were in Europe into the learning environment with the students that were in the U.S. So that was how he and I started working together and creating an environment for the students to work together, which we thought was brilliant, because we just think that… you’re an academic, you just think like, “oh, that’s a brilliant idea.” [LAUGHTER] And so we worked it through both with the Executive Director of International Programs, Francesca Cichello, and she was very happy about our ideas. So Tom and I worked feverishly to create the course. And while doing the course, we were also writing some articles. And then one day, Tom really came up with the idea and said it would be good for us to put together scholars from all over the world in this book. And it was particularly perfect since we were working with students in Europe as well as the US, it made sense to have an international perspective. Tom can go a little further on how that worked, but that’s the initial way that we started the conversation to create the book.

Tom: And that’s perfectly stated. That’s really how it happened. And it is interesting that this idea of a collaboration between the two of us then really launched the idea of the book, which was also really supporting collaboration, focused on teaching digital storytelling. So this course we’ve both been excited about as Sheila mentioned. We’ve both taught it individually. It’s really a legacy course that’s been a part of the online program for many years at Empire State University. And I think having that experience of teaching it together and thinking about how to revise the course, or this virtual exchange between Prague and the United States, had a lot to do with how the ideas developed. It’s interesting that when we got together and we decided to do this, again, virtually, a fully online course, we really took a close look at it, and I know we’ll be talking about metaliteracy later on, probably, but I do want to point out that we really did a really full revision of the course for this particular exchange, so that the core of it is still there. But even though I’ve been doing all this work with metaliteracy. Sheila said, we really need to build more of those metaliteracy ideas into it. And the idea of a metaliteracy is that students are reflective. They see themselves as producers of information. So that alignment between metaliteracy and the course really worked out perfectly. So we revised several of the core assignments in the course to build more of the metaliteracy components in it so that students could, not only participate in this virtual exchange between Europe and the US, but they also were able to think about themselves as metaliterate learners through this experience. So that was a key point too in the book is that when we decided to do the book, it was building this collaboration. We were hoping really to get interest from authors from around the world, which is what we ended up with, which we’ll talk about too. So we’re very excited that it has that international component, which was key to our experience. But we also asked all of the authors to really look at their experience teaching digital storytelling from around the world through the lens of metaliteracy. So some of them may have already been familiar with meta literacy if they were not. This provided them with an opportunity to look at their own teaching through that particular perspective, which I think also contributes to really what we have here with this book, Teaching Digital Storytelling.

John: We’ve discussed metaliteracy on an earlier podcast with Tom and Trudi Jacobson, and we will share a link to that in the show notes. But could you redefine for those listeners who don’t remember that episode or missed that episode, what metaliteracy is?

Tom: Sure, so I’ve been developing this idea of metaliteracy. And as you noted, this was really a full collaboration between me and Trudi Jacobson from the University of Albany, and we had been working together, really, for decades. And the idea originally started as this idea of reframing information literacy, so thinking about information literacy in a new way, and trying to move beyond just skills development, that is finding, locating, using information, which was an older definition, to really thinking about a meta literacy that’s more of a holistic, overarching, comprehensive framework that really encourages students to think about themselves as knowledge producers, specifically in the kinds of new environments that we’re in. When we first advanced the idea, it was thinking about social media, in particular, online communities that’s now evolved to the kinds of AI environments that we’re in, and specifically generative AI, and thinking about how Gen AI impacts the production experience. So no matter what environment a student is in, the idea is that they develop a metaliteracy mindset that prepares them for that information environment. That’s really important, because we know that these environments are always changing. And the AI experience, of course, is a really, kind of a revolutionary change in how we understand the production, distribution of information. AI is having an impact on all aspects of our life right now. So the idea, then, is that students think about themselves as producers of digital content, both individually and in collaboration with their peers. So that works perfectly for a course about digital storytelling where that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Rebecca: So the publication is part of the series of books on innovations and information literacy by series editor Trudi Jacobson, who we just mentioned. Can you talk a little bit about how the digital storytelling assignments helped to develop the student information literacy and metaliteracy skills that you’ve been talking about?

Tom: Sure, well, let me first say I really appreciate you mentioning that this is part of the larger series. And when we first brought the idea to Trudi Jacobsen, who I’ve been working with all these years, she loved the idea, so we really had her support, and then she was able to support us as we proposed this to Rowman and Littlefield. I also had this great opportunity to work with Charles Harmon, who I had worked with on several of my edited books with Trudi earlier in my career, so it’s really exciting to have that collaboration and to have Trudi’s support for this idea and how we revised it to include metaliteracy components.

Sheila: The course is staggered and in a structured way, to take students from step one, step two, to get through the process. Now with meta literacy, we found it because I love the whole idea of it, because I think that it puts students in a position to think about who they are in terms of not only a production, but even their learning ability. Are they more upfront? Are they more behind the scenes? How do they work within these different environments? So some of the things in meta literacy, like, do you prefer to work singularly? Do you want to work in a group? Are you more of a leader type? And so it makes the students delve into who they are in terms of a learner. And I think that is extremely important, because I think that part of teaching students who they are is oftentimes skipped in the educational and the learning environment, so to bring them in slowly, because, as we know students think, “Oh, digital storytelling, this is going to be a walk in the park.[LAUGHTER] I’m just going to do a little thing.” And that is so not what this course is about. So the first thing we have them do is a selfie, and in that selfie they can do it any way they want. And we got some really great stuff, because some students did anime, s ome students just sat in front of the camera. They were more comfortable with that. Other students did voice overs, and so it gave them an opportunity to create a hello to everyone in the course in any way they wanted to. So that’s an interesting thing, because usually, sometimes, students want to be told exactly what to do, and that’s not the case here. There are certain requirements, but you kind of have free reign to develop these narratives and stories however you wish. And believe me, we’ve had some interesting stories. So the selfies begin to connect them to the meta literacy framework. And Tom and I talked about this, wanted it in the very beginning of the course, because then that would inform how they went forward.

Tom: Absolutely, it’s really a great way to talk about that. And I really like the way, too, you mentioned that it’s making students aware of themselves as a learner, sort of that broader perspective. So we get them to do that right from the very beginning. The idea of a selfie too is everyone is familiar with the idea of taking a selfie picture. So the idea of a selfie video, I think it places them in a situation that they’re a little bit more comfortable with, that they kind of get what that is. They know what that is. So that means sure that they have to be on camera. But if they want to use an avatar, because some students don’t want to appear in front of the camera, that’s okay, they can start with the avatar. That first assignment is important too, because it’s an introduction to the course. They introduce who they are, where they’re from, whether they’re from Prague or the US. And the other thing we ask them to do. With metaliteracy, there’s a visual model that kind of simplifies and explains what this is. So it shows that the core four domains of learning, including metacognitive, affective, behavioral, cognitive then it shows as a central ring that shows the characteristics of the metaliterate learners, such as being productive, civic minded, things like that. But then the outer ring is focused on the roles of the meta literate learner, such as being a producer, a researcher, a communicator. So with that first assignment, that visual model, we present the model to the students, and it really had a big impact, I think, on the assignment itself, because we asked them to do more than just introduce themselves. We also asked them to select one of the metaliterate learner roles that they identify with the most. So it’s interesting. Some students will say, “Yeah, I see myself as a producer.” Others say, “I see myself as a communicator or researcher,” and that allows them, too, to say a little bit more about themselves. So maybe at work they’re an effective communicator, or maybe in their own time, working with social media, that they’ve already produced video or images or things like that. So it really allows for an excellent introduction to the course, while they’re also starting to investigate this metaliteracy model. So we really bring them into the conversation. It’s not just applying a model to our teaching, it’s really inviting students to think about the model themselves and to start grappling with what meta literacy is. Also, Sheila, I think you’ve really made a great point in terms of how we envision this as a kind of scaffolding. Throughout the course of the assignments, we go from the selfie video to then an assignment about mobile learning, so that we ask students to produce a digital story with their mobile device, because so much of what we do today is with our cell phones, and that’s really fascinating, and that gets them out in their community. So it gets them beyond just working with their laptop. They really think about what they can do as a digital storyteller with that cell phone that they always have in their pocket. Then the next assignment, again, kind of scaffolding, goes to a theme of empowerment, which is core to metaliteracy, because the whole idea, if you become aware of yourself as a metaliterate learner, then you are empowered, because you can make decisions about your learning. So it’s not just gaining insights about who you are, that’s a key part of it, but it’s then being able to identify, perhaps, where you need to improve. And that is empowering for students, and that, I think, is probably one of my favorite parts of the course. Sheila, I don’t know what you think of that, but when they really talk about empowerment, of their own empowerment, people in their lives who have empowered them, your parents or friends, or maybe even celebrities that they look up to, or authors, musicians, things like that, that, to me, is a real turning point in the class where they’re producing really sophisticated work, and they’re working with one of the key themes of meta literacy, which is empowerment.

Sheila: Absolutely. With that empowerment piece, it gives them freedom to bring forward what empowerment means to them, and they take different routes, like nothing is the same. And as Tom noted, some of them might do personal things. It might be a family member or whatever. Others might talk about a movement, others talk about a moment in time when they felt empowered. And I think that this is the beginning of them opening up and feeling some sort of autonomy in what they will create moving forward and realizing that, this course, you have to work. You have to actually do the work. This is not about memorization. This is not about a test in terms of you must answer these questions properly or you fail. This is practical and giving them experience that they can use moving forward, whether it is to document an older family member’s stories, whether it’s to document your community, whether to look at what’s happening outside, in terms of the world around us, and what are those things that make you feel that you are empowered? So it’s a great exercise that puts them in place for what is yet to come.

Tom: And I just want to jump in too with one other point, because as you were talking about that, it made me realize too that here’s another key aspect of our teaching digital storytelling, that also influenced the book, because this idea of students introducing themselves through the selfie and then also the empowerment piece is also key to another core theme to the book, which is diversity, equity, and inclusion. We really see this course as opening up conversations about students, their identity, who they are, and that was something else that when we put the call out to all the authors, we were hoping for international perspectives, which we certainly gained. We were also hoping for a discussion about metaliteracy. But the other core part of this book is really every chapter author focuses how digital storytelling really promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Sheila: Exactly. Very important point, yes.

John: Certainly, by having students tell their own stories, it automatically brings their lived experiences into their course. So I could see how that would be very useful. How might digital storytelling connect to campus DEI initiatives?

Tom: I think that the idea of digital storytelling, it’s a course, but what we do in this course could certainly be utilized in courses that are not about digital storytelling, which is, I think what we have in the book. There’s some authors who utilize digital storytelling techniques to support these ideas. So I would think that, in terms of campus initiatives, this idea of getting students to really utilize these digital tools, which continue to change, and now with certainly the generative AI revolution, this would be a great way for students to think about the production of their stories. Sheila, what do you think about that?

Sheila: I would say that, how does it connect to campus initiatives? I think by creating a safe environment for students to create a story and to share, because sometimes it’s very personal, and so for them to feel comfortable and safe in this environment and to produce it and edit it, can definitely connect to campus DEI issues, because this is another approach. This is not just, “Oh, we’re going to read this.” This is what DEI is, we’re going to try and do these initiatives. Students are living those DEI experiences in real time. And as we saw, like, particularly around the COVID era, students were sharing what that was like for them, depending on who they were, where their cultural place is in society. And I think that this, as Tom said, is definitely as connected. And I think it would be very useful for students to be involved in these sort of narratives across campuses. I think it would weave a fantastic story on how DEI is useful, how it has impacted them, what their experiences are, and I think that puts them more in the conversation, other than, “Oh, this acronym, DEI, I don’t know, it doesn’t really affect me,” or “I don’t know about it,” but when you give people a camera, a pen, and a piece of paper, it shifts the paradigm, and it shifts kind of like in public history. So public history is a bottom-up approach, not a top- down approach. And connecting digital storytelling to this is that you’re empowering your students. You’re empowering the people that now, the way we use technology, are able to share their story across different venues and take different approaches to do that. So, yes, I think it can be connected very much so.

Tom: Yeah, I think it’s interesting too, because it allows students, as Sheila said, to really utilize these digital tools that they all have access to, and in many ways, to reclaim that space, because there’s so much misinformation out there. There’s so much disinformation, especially sort of where we are right now, and it allows students to be reflective, to be ethical producers of information, telling their authentic story. At the end of the day, that’s really what we’re doing in this course, and it’s what we’re trying to advance and encourage with our authors, and they just did an amazing work in that area. So again, it’s also kind of a democratization of technology, because we’re saying, as Sheila pointed out, we’ll give some parameters, we give some suggested ideas for digital tools. But we also like it when they find tools that are easily accessible to them. They don’t have to buy a very expensive product to produce digital stories. So I think making them aware of that environment, that they are really the ones doing this kind of research to find interesting tools and then to use those in a productive and ethical way to tell their authentic story. I mean, that’s what the course is all about, and that’s really what the book is about.

Rebecca: I think it’s really important to underscore that storytelling is such a powerful way to communicate, and data is a powerful way to communicate, but the literature just really describes this power, and that literature is really extensive. Can you talk a little bit about why storytelling is so powerful as a form of communication?

Sheila: Well, storytelling, as we know, is ancient history. No pun intended, right? But it is something that’s been going on for years and years and years, and I think that because, prior to this technology, there were people in control of whose story they told, how they told the story, what they wanted to tell in their story, who would be excluded from the story, who would be included in the story. And so digital storytelling is an absolutely powerful tool in that regular everyday folks can take back that power and inform and properly display and write and direct and do this script and this story board and create and weave a story that is important to them, important to their community, and it puts them, so to speak, in the game. It’s no longer the idea of, “Well, I can’t buy a $10,000 camera, I can’t even buy a $1,000 camera. I don’t have the editing tool.” That is now passe. All you need, is a cell phone. On the flip side, if you want to do a non visual, all you need is a recorder. You can do an audio podcast. So I think, and I know Tom and I agree with this, storytelling is powerful and in the hands of the right people, it can evolve and include many more people than it would without digital storytelling, because then they have to go the traditional way, and that was very difficult at one time, it’s no longer as difficult, which means that the market gets flooded with good, bad, and ugly and indifferent things. But teaching in the environment that we teach, we’re coming from an angle where ethics is extremely important, using the proper materials are important, and we teach that all the way along. And then you do you, you create your story using what you’ve learned thus far, and you can share it just with the class. You can share it if you have a YouTube, Instagram, whatever. And then there’s something we can talk about after. And we have a museum that we’re further developing. And the idea of the museum, which started years ago, was to have an environment to put students’ work, because I always felt that sometimes students do some really great project, and then what? Where is it? They put in all this work all semester, and in that moment when they present, okay, this is great, But then, where is it? Well, ask permission for students who wish to have their work put in the museum, then it becomes a living space. So if they want to connect their family to the museum, their friends. If they’re going for a job in marketing or whatever, and they say, let me show you a little something I did while I was in school. They can connect, and it’ll be there, hopefully forever and ever, and demonstrates the work that they do. And that is another way of empowering students and letting them know that their work is important, and we put it in this environment, and it’ll be there till whenever, because we’ve had some great submissions with the students’ permission to put in the museum, which we hope to further develop. Well, we will. I don’t even hope to, we shall further develop it. I don’t believe in “Well, we tried.” No, we’re going to do it. We’re going to develop it further, and invite others to put their students’ work in the museum as well. It has a lot of good reasons for having it and what we’re doing.

Tom: That’s a really great point. And this was really Sheila’s idea, because it was based on a virtual museum that we’re using in digital storytelling was based on Sheila’s experience in public history. And so she had a virtual public history museum, which we’ve since adapted to this particular course. And it is important to this idea of narrative, because students, again, with their permission, they get to share their stories, and we get to see this over a period of time, and we’re really gaining quite a collection of student work that is, in many ways, instructive. So a key aspect of metaliteracy, one of the roles is teacher. So that learner as teacher. And in many ways, they’re doing that through their collaborative work. And we make them aware of that in the course. But I think they’re also doing it through the sharing of their stories that they’ve produced. It allows others to see the kind of work that can be done. And again, it gets to this point of how important narrative is. And students, I think, as producers of digital stories, I think they become much more discerning of the kinds of narratives they see on a daily basis, which is really important. So it allows them to be more analytical. It allows them to be more of a critical thinker in terms of the content they are receiving on a daily basis, because there are all kinds of digital stories. An advertisement could be a digital story. The kinds of political ads we’re seeing now, those are narratives, and we want students to be really discerning and as they access and review that information, one way we do it, too, I just thought of is, in addition to having them as producers, we also share with them and ask them to analyze digital stories that are about personal narratives. So there’s some great resources out there, StoryCorps, StoryCenter, Animation Block, which is really focused on animation in particular. So we’ve done some curation of really effective digital stories that we ask students to analyze as part of the online discussions and as part of their engagement with the readings that we provide as well. And I think that also contributes to their ability to analyze the kinds of narratives they see on a daily basis, and also being able to produce in an effective, ethical way, their own personal narratives, which are important. And one last thing I’ll say about this too, is that in the course, the writing really is a key part of this. So digital tools are important, but Sheila mentioned the script. So script writing, we spend quite a bit of time on just the words and having students really think about what they’re going to say, how they’re going to map this out as a professional script. They also have to do a visual storyboard, which is another key part of planning. So before they even jump into the digital tools, we really want them to reflect on what they’re writing, what it’s going to look like visually, and how all the pieces really come together through the digital story.

John: One aspect of what you both mentioned is that when students create this work, it’s very different than the type of work they do in many of their classes, where they write something up, they submit it to the learning management system, and then at the end of the term, it goes away and they never see it again. David Wiley refers to that as a disposable assignment…

Tom: Yes.

John: …and having something that lasts beyond the term, that they can share with people, that they can put on their LinkedIn profiles or share with their friends, their family, and so forth, is a really valuable experience. One of the other things, though, you’ve been talking about, is that you mentioned the course that you’ve taught together, and also that’s the basis for the first chapter of this. Could you tell us a little bit more about how the class is structured and how students interact between the two countries.

Sheila: The course, from the very beginning, attempts to bring them in together in the selfie, in the introduction, tell us a little bit about yourself type of thing, which they do in the selfie video. And throughout the course, it’s broken down into different steps, we have discussions. And so with the discussions, a student is required to make a comment based on the topic and readings of the week. They then have to respond to minimally two or more students on their posting. And by that, we don’t mean, and we specifically say like that doesn’t mean, “Thumbs up. Great post, looking good. Thanks a lot.” We explain to them that it’s a conversation and your comment is a continuation of the initial comment, so you want to come in like, “Oh, whatever, like, I didn’t know that. Now I understand. But according to this reading, this is what happened.” Or according to this video I saw this. Or the video that the original poster might have used, a student will say, “You know what? I went back and looked at that, and that was really interesting,” or, “that was really different.” So from the very beginning of the course, we bring them together, because we talk about this all the time, community. We say our course is a community. We’re in this together, and so it’s interesting. When it comes time to give feedback, students are very cautious when they have to reply, very cautious. And they tend to want to say everything nice, which is great, but also we want them to be respectful and comment in a way that makes the original poster either rethink or think about what they may not have seen, what they may have said, and how it’s being interpreted by others. So Tom, you can further expound, but I think that’s it in a nutshell.

Tom: Yeah, I agree completely that the kind of cultural exchange happens from that very first assignment, because as students are talking about themselves and which of the metaliteracy roles they identify with, they’re sharing something about themselves and their place and where they are, where they live. And I think that that really opens up the eyes of the students in Europe and the United States. The mobile story too, I’ve noticed, again, because a lot of students will take their cell phone, they’ll go out and they’ll show themselves in Prague and walk around Prague. So I think that’s really enlightening for the students in the US to see that. And keep in mind, these are Empire State University students who are studying in Prague through a partnership program. They don’t always have a lot of interaction with the US students, and that was one of the problems we were trying to solve. And Sheila really wanted to initiate this, it was how can we get the Prague students and the U.S. students, who are all earning degrees from Empire State University together? So this virtual exchange really allows that to happen, because otherwise it’s not a traditional international exchange program. Students studying in Prague are earning our degree, and so this really brings them together. So that’s really where I think the cultural exchange starts to happen. The other piece I want to build on with the discussions that for every digital story that’s produced, there’s also a peer review that’s a part of that assignment. So students really have to look at the rubric that we use for evaluating and they’re supposed to use that to really evaluate the work of peers. And as Sheila noted, sometimes they might be a little shy in those kinds of conversations, but because they’re working with the criteria, that really helps them to do that. So that’s also a kind of exchange of ideas. Then I think the culminating project, the closing project, while these are all individual stories, that does have interaction through peer review, the final collaborative project, students work together as a team to explore a social cause. So it could be climate change, for instance, a lot of students are very interested in that, which is encouraging, and they’ll do research on climate change, and then they’ll work together as an international team. And we make sure that we definitely when we put the teams together, we make sure there’s always enough of that kind of exchange to happen, so that as they’re working together they learn about each other, they learn about who they are, they learn about where they live, their culture, which is really important. And of course, some of that, they have to face some challenges. Sometimes they’ll complain a little bit about the fact that there’s a time difference, a six-hour time difference, and we say, “Well, we would like you to work in teams for some of this. So that means you have to try and coordinate some time to do that. But also a lot of this can happen asynchronously.” But I think even working through those challenges, is really productive for them, because that’s the real world. If you’re going to have virtual collaboration around the world, that’s what you’re going to have to deal with. And they ultimately work through it really well. And I think, in many ways, those final projects are probably some of the best projects in the class, and it’s just so inspiring to see the kinds of social causes they take on and that they address in a rational research-based way, and then how creative they are. It’s also that key metaliteracy piece that I mentioned earlier, of learner as teacher. That’s one of the key roles you play in these kinds of environments. And they’re doing that. A student who might be highly skilled with the digital tool is explaining to other students how that works, or maybe a student who’s a very strong writer is kind of sharing that work as a writer, and they’re really helping each other out. It’s very much a teacher/learner, mentor/learner, I would even say, kind of experience which brings it all together to why the focus on metaliteracy is really key to this digital storytelling course.

Sheila: The other piece is that with the metaliteracy framework, when we break the students into groups, so there might be four to five in a group, and they are responsible for choosing what their position will be. So who’s going to be the editor, who’s going to do the filming, who’s going to do the narration, if they’re going to use music, how’s that going to work? And so everyone in that group is supposed to take on a job and then do their piece and bring their pieces together to work on a final project. As Tom mentioned a moment ago, sometimes there’s perceived issues. “Oh well, I’m in Prague, six-hour difference, or I’m in New York, I don’t know, I can‘t. I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” And I always come back with “this is real world stuff that you’re doing. And so what would you do if the CEO of your company is on one continent and you’re on another, and you have work to do and you have to present. How are you going to do that? So this is a mini prep for you to learn how to adapt to different environments, because the traditional environment is slowly going away.” And so we have people working remotely all over the world, with people from different time zones, different regions. And so what do you say when there’s a 12-hour difference? Do you say, “Well, I’m sorry I’m sleeping or I don’t have time?” No, you’re going to find a way to work through it. So this is a mini exercise. This is your boot camp in learning how to adjust and work with eople that are not physically in front of you, that are not physically in your time zone, and are a part of your project. So there’s a lot of practical experience for them in this course as well. And as you noted, it’s not your traditional course. And students come in at first thinking, “Oh, I could do this in my sleep,” until they see, “uh oh, I actually have really do some things in here.” And that’s when it becomes interesting. And I love watching the changeover as they go through it. And they start learning, and they feel a little more safer in the course, and they start taking chances, and they’re creating different projects and different narratives is absolutely wonderful. And as Tom also mentioned, with that final project, it has to be on a social issue. So whether it be homelessness, mental health, drugs, climate change, they get in, and you can see the passion for the topic by the very final product they produce together. It’s absolutely wonderful. I love this course. I absolutely love it. I love working with Tom on this and this museum idea was thought of and developed many years ago. And a colleague of mine at Empire, Lisa Rappel, she was initially involved with me to get it done, and then life got in the way. So it was kind of just sitting there. And when Tom and I got together with this course, and I was so excited, I thought, “oh my god, we can use the museum,” and Tom and I got busy and started working with it. So we’re hoping to kick it up a notch, and you have to stay up on technology and so you never get a break, because soon as you learn something, it’s like, “oh, okay, great. Well, that’s passe.” Now we’ve got a new thing, so we’re going to work on making that museum even better than what it is right now, and it’s pretty good right now, but we want to kick it up a notch, and particularly with all this AI that’s going on, and this AI is developing as we speak, it’s important for us to create this environment that uses technology in a very responsible way, while teaching the students as well.

Rebecca: So you’ve both mentioned many aspects of ethics and AI, so maybe you can share a little bit about how you’ve incorporated that into your course.

Tom: When this openAI initiative brought so much attention to AI, the very first thing we did, in addition to the digital stories, there’s an assignment early in the course where they have to write about the ethics of digital storytelling. So that’s the assignment we first revised because we really wanted students to reflect on the ethics of AI, and there’s so much creative potential as well. So you can see how that’s also wrapped into this course, but that’s really the assignment we first revised, and we changed the questions and changed the resources, and really asked students to really think about what are the ethical implications of generative AI for producing digital stories. One of the resources for that assignment is something from StoryCenter. It’s the Digital Storytelling Bill of Rights. [LAUGHTER] So students get to think about the Bill of Rights of a digital storyteller and also the subject of digital stories. But I think revising that assignment was really important because they really have a chance to think about those ethical aspects which are so key. The other thing about this course is that we promote, in addition to freely available digital tools, it already had a very strong component about the use of materials that are openly licensed through Creative Commons. So we don’t want students using resources just by downloading things from the web. They have to be either public domain or Creative Commons. Now AI opens up much more potential. I think in our next revision, there’s more we actually want to do with the course, to really give them permission to use Dall-E, for instance, to create images. And also, of course, there’s now new generators for creating video, and that’s something we’re going to embrace and build into the course. Instead of telling students “don’t do it,” we’re going to ask them, “How can you do it in an ethical and responsible way?”

Sheila: Exactly, exactly, because it’s with us, it’s not going anywhere. So, we’ve got to figure out a way to incorporate it in a responsible way and make them ask the question, instead of being the sage on the stage, that’s not what we do with this course, we want to invoke their critical thinking and for them to think about what is happening around them in a way that makes sense, as opposed to us telling them, “ Oh, this is not good, you don’t need to do that.” Because they don’t listen anyway. So it’s better to let them learn how to discern and how to critically analyze and think on their own. I think that’s what we want from all our citizens.

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

Sheila: Well, I think what’s next is… well, there’s several things the sky’s the limit, right? But I think that another revision to the course for next spring, as Tom said, to really input AI and figure out how we want to do that, and to hopefully get some grant money… anybody listening… to help us upgrade the museum, because we believe it’s a wonderful space for students, and I think that walking the road of life and seeing what narratives I could think about and get involved with, and more co-teaching with Tom, because I thoroughly enjoy it. We love it. We absolutely love it.

Tom: Yeah, we really do. You can tell. Sheila and I have known each other so long, and we just love working together in the teaching and the research. And I agree completely. I think that the revision to include more AI components is definitely what we want to do this year. I think continued research presentations, talking about the book. We’re really excited about the book. I’m really interested too… I think we both are… in continuing to engage with some of the book authors who contributed to this book. We were so excited that three of the authors or author teams are from South Africa. So when we put the call for hoping for these global perspectives that we’re able to reach that. The book itself covers, in addition to our perspectives, just looking at the table of contents, we have authors who write about meta-theater as digital storytelling, the metaliteracy of memes, digital book making as a form of digital storytelling, local history, story maps. There’s so many creative ideas out there that if we could continue to promote this idea of digital storytelling building it into the curriculum, helping campuses to advance their DEI initiatives, that would be amazing. So I think that’s what we’re really hoping for, and that’s the idea of the book too is that this gets the conversation going. It’s our experience, but then it’s also building on our experience to bring in other scholars and teachers and students.

Sheila: And this all evolved out of our engagement with students in the course, so they’re at the core of everything that Is transpired after that as a result of the course.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your book and all of your stories.

Sheila: [LAUGHTER] Thank you.

Tom: Thank you. We enjoyed it. [LAUGHTER]

Sheila: Absolutely. And may digital storytelling just keep on going and going and going. Thank you so much. This is wonderful.

[MUSIC]

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

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

[MUSIC]

357. Inclusive Socratic Teaching

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

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

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

Show Notes

Transcript

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

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

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

Jamie: Hello.

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

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

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

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

John: And I have Lady Grey tea today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamie: I think he won an Oscar for it,

John: I believe so, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamie: Yes, yes. [LAUGHTER]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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355. Class Dismissed

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

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

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

Show Notes

Transcript

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

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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

Tony: Hi. Thank you all for having me.

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

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

Rebecca: That sounds yummy, maybe afterwards, huh?

Tony: Indeed.

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

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

Rebecca: I’m trying. [LAUGHTER]

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

Rebecca: that’s on theme

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

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

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

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

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

Tony: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting, a nice balance.

Tony: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

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

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

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

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

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

Tony: I am too

Rebecca: …extra memorable. [LAUGHTER]

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

Tony: Awesome. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us.

Tony: Thank you all so much.

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

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

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354. International College Students

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

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

Show Notes

Transcript

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

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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

Peter: Hi.

Hayley: Hi.

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

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

Rebecca: It’s perfect.

John:And Haley?

Hayley: I’m drinking chai today.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: …and Rebecca?

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

Peter: That’s exciting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hayley: Yeah, thank you so much.

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

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

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