250. Hacking Assessment

Traditional grading systems often encourage students to focus on achieving higher grades rather than on their learning. In this episode, Starr Sackstein joins us to discuss how classes can be redesigned to improve student engagement and learning. Starr has been an educator for 20 years and is currently the COO of Mastery Portfolio, an educational consultant, and instructional coach and speaker. She is the author of more than 10 books on education, including the best-selling Hacking Assessment: 10 ways to go gradeless in a traditional grades school, which has just been released in a new edition.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Traditional grading systems often encourage students to focus on achieving higher grades rather than on their learning. In this episode, we discuss how classes can be redesigned to improve student engagement and learning.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Starr Sackstein. Starr has been an educator for 20 years and is currently the COO of Mastery Portfolio, an educational consultant, and instructional coach and speaker. She is the author of more than 10 books on education, including the best-selling Hacking Assessment: 10 ways to go gradeless in a traditional grades school, which has been released in a new edition. Welcome, Starr.

Starr: Thanks so much. I’m excited to be here.

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

Starr: I am drinking water. No tea unfortunately, not yet.

Rebecca: Not yet. Okay. See, there we go, there’s promise there. I have Scottish Breakfast tea today.

John: And I have spring cherry green tea.

Rebecca: Well, that’s good.

Starr: Those both sound delicious, really.

Rebecca: So, you haven’t had that one in a while, John.

John: I haven’t had any in a while…

Rebecca: true that…

John: …we took a pause in recording for about a month. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Fair. But even prior to that it had been a while I think.

John: I think so too.

Rebecca: We invited you here today to discuss Hacking Assessment. The first edition of your book seven years ago helped to launch the ungrading movement. Could you give us some background on what prompted you to move away from traditional grading systems?

Starr: Absolutely. In years one to five when I was in the classroom, I would say that I pretty much did grading and assessment the way it was done to me. And the one major significant thing that changed during that time was I had a child. And in his elementary school, they actually use standards-based grading. And when I got his first report card and saw just how much information I got from his teachers, and how the behaviors were separate from the actual learning and the narratives were really aligned with where he needed support and what was going on. I was like, Mmmh…for someone teaching AP English, only having the opportunity to give one grade, with pre slugged sort of comments that I was allowed to bubble into my… back then we were still using Scantrons for entering grades. I’m definitely dating myself by saying that, but it’s the truth. And I started getting really frustrated with that. And from there, I started doing a lot of reading. Alfie Kohn has really played with a lot of these ideas for a long time now. And then folks like Ken O’Connor, who had the book 15 Fixes for Broken Grades, his first edition, I think it’s been republished twice already, in the time since I’ve read from there. I read his book, and I was like, “Oh, my God, I am doing all of this wrong.” There are so many things on this list that I do, and I never thought about it that way, and it’s just not how I want to keep doing things. And I think there’s a synergy with when you decide to read a book, whether or not it resonates with you and whether or not you’re ready to start implementing the things that you learn. And I think I was very ready to first acknowledge that the practice I was doing wasn’t serving my students as well as I could. And I was looking for alternatives. So having those jumping off points, having read a bunch of different things, and then meeting Mark Barnes along the way as well, and experimenting with alright, well, these are suggestions for this kind of space. What does this look like in New York City public schools, as an 11th and 12th grade English teacher and also as a journalism teacher? How do I start making this work? And that’s sort of how it all happened and then it took years to figure out how do I make this work well, because I did it for a while before it worked well. [LAUGHTER] There were a lot of mistakes, unfortunately.

John: We’ve been dealing with a number of people starting to experiment with ungrading in college, but it’s a little bit easier in a college environment, I think, to make these changes, because there’s a little bit less structure imposed on teachers. How were you able to implement this in a K through 12 system?

Starr: So I think I was very fortunate to be in a very small community when I started doing this. We were six to 12. I was already a very established teacher in that community. I had a track record of getting students prepared for college. And most of the families when I made choices, always kind of knew that they were intentional, and there were reasons. And in my AP classes, that was probably the most struggle, because parents get nervous when they have 12th graders, what is this gonna look like on the transcript? How is this going to impact my students moving forward from school? And I just really tried to set up systems and to be super transparent about everything that we were doing so that first of all, I live streamed my class a lot, for better or for worse. And I say that because not every class was a winner. So if you were watching when it wasn’t a winner, like, well, this is reality, it wasn’t a good day. But I think they were able to see the rigor of what was going on in the space and despite the fact that it didn’t look like what normal AP classes looked like, they could appreciate my wanting to be flexible to the individual learners in my classroom… that even the creative projects I was asking them to do was often a lot more intensive than just doing a test or just writing a paper and gave that level of inquiry into that process as well so that students could be really excited about the learning they were doing. And the more comfortable I got with different technologies… I experimented with blogging to increase reading. That’s one of the biggest problems in English classes. I think most kids don’t read the books for a lot of different reasons. So how do you get them to read when you’re teaching a literature class, beyond just the five or seven or 10 books you’re reading as a whole class. So they started blogging, and we started using the blogging communities for recommendations on different books they were enjoying on their own and why they enjoyed it. And I really encouraged them to use that space too as a way to develop their writing voice. So it wasn’t like analytical writing all the time, it was more conversational… reaction sort of stuff to what they were reading and focused instead of like overviews of everything that they read… an analysis paper, which isn’t always fun for every single kid. I started tweaking that and I think parents appreciated my transparency. I did screencasts of our dashboard, because I had changed the way I was using the tool that my whole school was using. So like, if you have any questions, this is what it looks like, this is what you’re seeing. And if they emailed me, I just really tried to get back to them immediately, so that I could really put their concerns to rest before they started doing the thing that parents do, where they start making it a lot worse than it actually is. So I tried to catch that right away. To be honest, though, my colleagues were the ones with the greater pushback than parents and students… a couple of students, but just shifting the conversation away from grades, instead of what did I get? What did you learn? How can we track that progress over time? How do you know you learned it? Where do you see that evidence in your own learning. And I think very soon after getting in the routine of this is how we do things now they got it and saw that the level of metacognition as well as the rigor in the actual tasks were much greater than what they would have been seeing in a regular class anyway. So sometimes I got the: “this writing reflection is like a whole other paper that you’re asking us to do.” And I’m like, “Yeah, it is. But it also helps me give you better feedback, and it also helps me know where I need to adjust my instruction. So there’s a reason and it’s worthwhile, and it’s gonna help you, when you’re not just in school. This is a practice that you’ll probably carry with you.”

Rebecca: One of the things that you just brought up, Starr, is something that I definitely want to follow up on, which is getting our colleagues to also buy into this, and administrators. We exist within systems that require grade inputs. Grades are transcripted. So how do we get the people around us who support us professionally, to get on board? And what does that actually look like, functionally, when we’re generating grades when we’re saying we’re kind of ungrading all semester.

Starr: So those are really good questions. And in the second edition, I actually have built in leadership tips to support leaders who are unfamiliar with this kind of assessment practice and how they can support teachers who want to do it, if they’re not doing it wholesale as a school. I advocate for systemic use of this practice, because if we catch kids much younger, by the time they get to high school, their language and fluency in discussing their own learning is a lot greater. I was a 12th grade teacher, my kids had come through an entire system where this was not how it was done. So it was like, literally at the last minute, I’m like, “Yeah, I know, that’s the way you’ve been doing it this whole time. But we’re gonna do it a little differently and I promise you’ll still get into college.” It’s a different vibe. And my colleagues, I think, knew my students appreciated it, because they would start hearing from my students: “How come you don’t do this?” …which is also like a little bit of a target was put on my back, because if a school or a district is going to make the shift, it requires a lot of professional learning. And if you aren’t the kind of teacher who makes the time to do learning on your own, then there really does need to be supports put in place prior to it’s happening. And I’m a super reflective teacher, I did National Board Certification, I will go out of my way to get myself to a conference even if my school wasn’t paying for it. Because as an educator, I felt it was an essential part of my job to continually grow and model that for my students. But not every teacher is like that. And I’m not suggesting that everyone has to be or whatever their process is, but I do think it’s important to invite colleagues into your space, give them that “what you could do tomorrow kind of tips” like what are the first few steps you could take to try this out before you commit to it wholesale. And in terms of the grading aspect, the way that I got around the traditional grading was assessment conferences with my students. So really building in a vibrant and robust portfolio system where students were collecting their learning over a larger period of time, giving them the vocabulary to talk about their growth as they looked at those things, and then a conversation just like this. So based on the standards we worked on this marking period, where do you find yourself in terms of mastery? And what does that translate to for a report card grade, because I had to put a grade on the report card as well. So it was really just making them acutely aware of what exemplary work looks like, how they were meeting benchmarks to get there over time, and then also switch that transactional sort of relationship around getting grades to a more progress minded model, where they understand learning doesn’t happen in one sitting. And even though you may have successfully completed one assignment, that doesn’t mean you’ve mastered a particular skill, it’s just your first go at it. In order to get to that mastery level, you have to do it over time with less and less support, and kind of do it on your own.

John: What sort of buy in did you get from other teachers that you were working with?

Starr: It was secret at first. There were like people just dropping by out of curiosity to see what was going on in my classroom. Then a couple of other people just asking, “what would this look like in my gradebook?” I was very lucky in the one sense that our whole school was a portfolio school. So that part of it was already there. And then I also did some PD with my colleagues around reflection practices. We tried to really create something that was consistent, and also the same. So like I had created a process for doing reflection, which is that five steps sort of: first, you have to reexamine what was it I was asked to do? What were my steps for completing the assignment? Where do I think I’m meeting the goals that I set for myself? How am I doing that? What level am I doing that at? And what would I do differently in the future? And then we kind of scaffold that down to sixth grade up to 12th grade. So what is that kind of reflection look like in a sixth grade classroom, a seventh grade classroom, all the way up to 12. So that there are realistic expectations in that space around those things. And my classroom was always open. And I resented the fact that when my principal decided that she wanted us to go to a standards-based model, I implored her to not do it the way she did. I think we should have a pilot team, we should have a committee that does this, we should test it out first, try to get either a grade level team or a content area vertically to commit to doing this and then have input from more people. And then we need to train folks in the areas they aren’t already familiar with, starting with unpacking standards and getting them comfortable with that kind of language and what our expectations are. But that’s not what happened. It was like an email that went out. We’re going to do this this year. And it was a disaster. And I got attached to the disaster as a direct correlation to how all that happened. And unfortunately, you get one good shot to make a significant assessment or grading shift in a decade, because unless your folks are leaving quickly, no one forgets. So really setting up systems in the future, if folks who are listening want to do this on a bigger scale, set yourself up for a three- to five-year implementation plan, start small and grow it organically and provide tons of support along the way so everybody feels confident and not just your teachers, your community also. What does this look like for your parents? What are they going to be receiving that’s different? And just make sure that you have answers to commonly asked questions on the front end, so that when new stuff starts coming in, you’re ready to triage that, you’re not just answering the standard questions over and over and over again.

John: You mentioned in your first edition of the book that one of the motivations for this was to get students to focus on their learning rather than on grades. How successful was this? Did this work for most students?

Starr: For most, yes. And believe it or not, the ones that don’t traditionally do school well, who don’t play the game, it worked best for them. And as three educators sitting on this podcast right now, I think we can all agree that sometimes our brightest students are not the ones who do the best. The ones who do the best are the ones who are most committed to getting high grades and kind of checking the boxes and doing everything that they have to be compliant for in order to get that score. So when we shifted the focus away from that and started looking at skill acquisition and content deepening, and really getting them to be able to advocate for their own needs in that specific area, I think that it wasn’t just about them completing the tasks I asked them to do, but it required them to engage with me in a dialogue in the kinds of tasks they wanted to be doing, the way they wanted to be doing it. And it required my flexibility with taking that input and actually putting it into action. So I think that once they saw that I was listening to their feedback actively and using it right away to shift the way class looked, they understood that I wasn’t just saying, “I’m asking you to do this,” it was a real partnership, where if this is going to be successful, and you want your voice to be heard, you need to contribute or else you can’t complain when you don’t like what ended up happening, because I really did try to say “yes,” just about to everything, if they could articulate how their decisions and their choices aligned with what the objectives were, then I was totally hands off in their process to sort of help them be successful in the big picture. And it also really decreased the amount of folks who didn’t participate in the group work or didn’t participate in the learning. So when people say my students don’t finish work, or they don’t submit things, to me, that’s a red flag that either something else is going on that you need to get to the bottom of, or the kind of learning you’re asking them to do isn’t resonating. And rather than just pulling out the binder from what you’ve done for the last 20 years, you really do have to make a concerted effort to make changes so that it meets the needs of the kiddos that are sitting in front of you right now.

Rebecca: So you’ve talked a lot about reflection, and the role reflection is playing. Can you talk a bit about how you were able to get students up to the level of reflection that is really meaningful and gets to this metacognitive skill, building

Starr: Feedback, feedback, feedback. We give a lot of feedback to everything that kids do in the classroom. But the first few times we ask them to reflect, it’s so important that we’re also giving them feedback on their reflections, providing exemplars for them, really creating success criteria too, like that co-construction, like if I’m telling you, these are three examples that are wildly different, but all successful, what do you notice about all three of them? What are the things that need to be a part of every single reflection that we do. And then as they do them, rather than have them revise every single one that they do, since they’re doing them with every major assignment, it’s like, “alright, well, now take the feedback you got from the last one, apply it to this one and let’s see if we can’t grow you.” And usually by, I would say November, they’re already writing fairly good reflections and their ability to have conversation about their level of learning already starts to increase, because by November, you’ve already had a progress report conversation, you’ve already had a quarter one report card conversation. And I was doing a lot of modeling myself, like I would reflect openly on how successful projects went, in my estimation, and be really, really tied to the outcomes. And not just what I think or what I feel, but what I noticed, and how I would do it differently if we had the opportunity to do something similar again. And I think, again, that level of transparency and my comfort with saying to them, I don’t know how to make this better. What do you think? What made this experience challenging? Were my directions not as clear as they could have been? What do I need to learn from this experience? So it was very much a two-way street, which took time. And I do want to say that too. Like, I think I was seven or eight years into the classroom before I was comfortable enough to say “I didn’t know something.” That takes confidence in a way that you don’t really think. In the beginning of my career, I felt like I needed to be the expert over all of the students in my room, and I had to have an answer for everything. And I said a lot of wrong things because I was trying so hard to look like an authority. And I think the older I get, the more I work with educators, the more I realize that I’m a learner, I don’t know everything, even the stuff I’ve spent a lot of time teaching I don’t know everything about and new perspectives are incredibly useful in how I approach something because it’s the first time this group of kids is seeing something I might have tried before. Their input is extraordinarily useful for me to make changes moving forward.

John: It’s also a great way of nurturing a growth mindset in students by reminding them that we’re all part of this learning experience together. And that no matter how much experience you have, there’s always more you can learn. And so I think that’s a really great process. And it’s something that I think it generally takes a while for most people to get to.

Starr: Yeah.

John: So you mentioned having conferences with students, how often do you conference with students?

Starr: So, there’s lots of different levels of conferencing. So you have your in-class formative conversation where they’re asking questions and you’re taking the pulse of whether or not you’re going too fast or if you need to stop the class and do a mini lesson on something you notice everyone’s struggling with. Or if you pull a small group because only a small group of kids are really having an issue. So there’s that kind of on-the-fly conferencing where you’re walking around with a clipboard or an iPad and you’re taking notes on what you see. And then listening to the questions kids are asking and making a determination as to whether or not this is a small or bigger issue that needs to be addressed. And then there are formal conferences where kids are coming prepared to have that conversation where you’re giving them time in class. So part of my structuring… because remember, I said it took me a long time to find a system that worked that ended up in Hacking Assessment… so I started creating Google Forms, where there were very targeted questions that also aligned with the assessments that we did, and the different pieces of learning and the standards that we were addressing at that time. And before they could set up a conference, they needed to fill in that whole Google form, then I had all that informatio, so I could really target clarifying questions or gaps that we could spend our five minutes talking about. If they had done all the work to do certain things, they don’t have to rehash what I could read. And if I had 34 students in most of my classes, so there’s a lot of kids, there’s a little time, you really have to make that three to five minutes count, and give every student the opportunity to give you the most information that you could have to be able to determine what was going to go on the report card. So those conversations certainly got a lot better over time as well. The first one, there was a lot of prompting from me, a lot of questions to get them ready by conference number 2, 3, 4, and certainly by the end of the year, if you watch on my YouTube channel, I have examples of what those look like. By the end of the year, the student is doing 98% of the talking. And I’m just redirecting if they kind of get off a little bit, or if they miss a spot versus at the beginning, it’s more of like a 40-60 where I am interjecting and kind of bolstering confidence, helping them set goals and stuff. So there’s more of a give and take at the beginning of the year.

John: You mentioned giving students some choice in terms of the assignments and so forth. What are some of the more interesting assignments or learning activities that your students have come up with?

Starr: The one that always comes to mind was, towards the end of my time in the classroom, before I became an instructional coach, I literally gave my students my entire unit plan for Hamlet. And I said, “Alright, this is the way I always teach it. But I want to do it differently this year. So I want you to look at the overall objectives. And as a group, I want you to come up with something different, then we’re going to vote as a class, which group suggestion we want to go with, and whichever group is chosen, you’ll come meet with me at lunch, we’ll design an assignment together and work through the success criteria and benchmarks for doing it successfully.” And if I tell you some of the things these kids came up with, I would have never come up with in a million years. And what we landed on was these psychological profiles of the characters of Hamlet, where they had to first use the text, to use Shakespeare’s language, to diagnose them with some kind of psychological issue. For example, Gertrude would be a narcissist. And then they do research on the actual issue, so there’s a research component as well. And then they had to come up with a treatment plan for the character and create a movie that demonstrated the growth from whatever the treatment plan was. And what it really did was have this really in-depth character analysis of each character from Hamlet, regardless of which character you did, you were set on a course. And then we also created this Google form, so that when we had screenings of the movies at the end, students were actively taking notes about what they learned about the characters and giving feedback at the same time to the creators of those movies about what they learned and what they were still curious about. And it was really phenomenal, honestly. I think that I wish I would have started doing stuff like that sooner. Other examples would have been students creating movies in Minecraft, like for our satire movies, that’s usually so like, just technology, but I was very uncomfortable with, that they were able to use that. I was like, yeah, “If you could do it without my support, I could help you with content, but you’re on your own for the technology.”

Rebecca: So you’ve hinted at some of the changes in your second edition. Can you highlight some additional changes between the first and second edition?

Starr: Okay, so yes, there are a lot more resources. So over the last seven years, part of the reason I hadn’t made a second edition up till this point, was because I really wanted there to be a value added. I wanted there to be new voices I can highlight. I was really also looking for systems that started doing this work because I wanted there to be more case study material that kind of went in that it wasn’t just single teachers kind of playing with it, but actually systematizing it in ways that work for them. So there are brand new hacks and actions for every single chapter, all of them have read the first edition and implemented it in their own way. So what you’re getting is people’s take on how what they learned looks like. I really tried to implement K to higher ed. So Susan Blum did write a section as well on what it looks like in college for all of my reticent K-12 folks who were like, “This isn’t going to be viable in the future.” I had central office people write about stakeholder buy in and how they brought this into their space from a leader perspective, instead of just a classroom perspective. A lot of new tools that have been developed in the last seven years, lots of stuff about that, rubrics, progressions, not just in English, which was my background, obviously, really trying to span math, science, social studies, related arts. So there’s one with a music teacher writing about how they’ve done that in that area… elementary teachers. So there really are tons of resources with a lot of different fresh voices who are using this now, as well as a very intentional talk about equitable practices. I think a lot of this stuff is equitable, but I never thought of it in that lens until COVID. And then once COVID happened, really trying to talk about how these things address some of those gaps that need to be addressed, but weren’t explicitly tied to them in the past. So that’s really where the bulk of things have shifted. And then there’s an incredible appendix with lots and lots of examples of everything.

John: And your first edition was wonderful. It provides a lot of good resources. And in each section, it talks about how to deal with pushback, which is one of the things anyone introducing something new has to deal with. So I’m assuming that continues into the second edition.

Starr: Yep, sure does.

John: So your first edition was very successful, and has received a lot of traction at all levels of education, and helped spur the ungrading movement at the college level that we’ve been talking about a lot in the last couple of years with our guests, and with many of our colleagues. For those people who have read the first edition, what would be the benefits to them of picking up the second edition, and who should they share that with at their institutions?

Starr: So I’m really hopeful that this time, it’s not individual teachers picking the book up on their own, although I certainly advocate for that. I want to see teams use this as a PLN opportunity and explore the text in a way that makes sense to them. It is not narrative, necessarily. So each chapter is its own sort of entity. And so I would encourage folks to choose the chapter that they’re most ready for at this moment and pick it apart in a way that’s going to make most sense for their practice.

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

Starr: Oh, I’m so glad you asked. So what’s next for me right now, we are doing a free book study with the new book when it launches August 2, and it’ll be on Amazon. And then also, once this one launches, and things are moving, I’m under contract with ASCD for my next book, which is specifically about portfolios and student-led conferences. So that is still something that’s a little thinner in Hacking Assessment, because I think that that really requires a little bit more depth than I could give it in that book in one chapter. So I am currently working on that and really trying to gather with some of the districts that I’m working with to build really great systems for building portfolios. What does that look like? And how do you parlay that piece into these student-led conferences so that you can have a robust system in your space?

John: That sounds like a great supplement. Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you. We’ve heard mention of your book from many of our past guests, and I’m glad I was finally able to get to read it. And I’m looking forward to the second edition, which should be arriving soon.

Starr: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you so much. This is such great information and we’re looking forward to all your new work as well.

Starr: 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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248. Reframing Academic Expertise

Professors are generally represented in popular culture as white male experts who dispense knowledge to their students through lectures. Young female professors are often encouraged to portray themselves as authoritative figures, even when this role does not reflect their personalities and their educational philosophies. In this episode, Rebecca Scott joins us to discuss how she has rejected this stereotype by sharing vulnerability and building classes that rely on the co-creation of knowledge.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Professors are generally represented in popular culture as white male experts who dispense knowledge to their students through lectures. Young female professors are often encouraged to portray themselves as authoritative figures, even when this role does not reflect their personalities and their educational philosophies. In this episode, we discuss how one professor has rejected this stereotype by sharing vulnerability and building classes that rely on the co-creation of knowledge.

[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 Rebecca Scott. Rebecca is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harper College, and also a guitarist and vocalist in the band Panda Riot, which just released their fourth album. She’s also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by our friend Jessamyn Neuhaus from SUNY Plattsburgh. Welcome, Rebecca.

Rebecca S.: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

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

Rebecca S.: I’m drinking coffee.

Rebecca: Oh, a coffee drinker….

John: Well, we drink coffee too, once in a while.

Rebecca: Very occasionally, but not on this podcast. [LAUGHTER]

John: I am drinking Irish Breakfast tea this morning.

Rebecca: Oh, it sounds like a good theme. John. I have English breakfast this morning.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your chapter on “Reframing Academic Expertise through Vulnerability and Metacognition” in Picture a Professor and some of the other work that you’re doing. But before we discuss this, could you talk a little bit about your institution, and the courses that you teach?

Rebecca S.: Harper College is a two-year college, or community college, in the suburbs of Chicago. And, because we’re a community college all my classes really are introductory classes or don’t have any prerequisites anyway. So I mostly teach Intro to Philosophy, Critical Thinking, and Ethics, then I occasionally get to teach Biomedical Ethics and the occasional honors class. And in the fall, we have a new program that’s a social justice studies distinction. So I’m going to be teaching an Intro to Philosophy class that’s specifically for that Social Justice Studies program at our college.

Rebecca: Your chapter title is really intriguing in Picture a Professor. Can you talk a little bit about or give us a little teaser on how you reframe academic expertise through vulnerability and metacognition?

Rebecca S.: In that chapter, when I was approaching this question of how do we address these kinds of biases against professors who come from marginalized identities, the way that I came to this question is, when I was first starting out, people would give me a lot of advice about, “Oh, you know, you’re young, and you look young, and you’re a woman, and you have to be really careful.” And I feel like a lot of the advice I got was that I needed to be like, strict and I needed to be like, hard, and I needed to take on this authoritative stance so that people would give me credibility. And it just felt really not who I was. It just wasn’t me. And it works for some people, I think, and that’s great. I’m not in any way saying that people shouldn’t necessarily do those things. But for me, it really just was not the way that I wanted to teach. And so I’m always trying to figure out how can I have authority and credibility in a way that feels authentic to who I am. And so this got me thinking about the ways that part of the problem with the sort of stereotypical image of the professor is not necessarily that we don’t have enough different kinds of people occupying the role of the professor, but that the whole concept of the professor is part of the problem. And so in my chapter, I’m thinking about how can we think about not just having different kinds of bodies and people occupying this social role, but what ways do we need to actually change the social role in the first place? And so I think that the kind of epistemic authority that a professor has is often this individualistic, like knowledge is a kind of property that is sort of won through this genius and hard work or whatever, and not thinking about the ways in which knowledge is constructed and maintained in communities. In my chapter, I’m thinking about how do we teach in a way that presents academic or professorial or epistemic expertise in a way that acknowledges the ways in which knowledge comes about in and through communities. And so the vulnerability and metacognition are sort of like two strategies. So for me, like kind of leaning into the vulnerability and modeling epistemic humility when you don’t know things and being engaged in the process of coming to know rather than seeing knowledge is something that you arrive at, like “Now I’m a professor, so I know all the thing and you are the students and you don’t know the things and let me figure out a way for you to have the knowledge that I have,” …because even in, I think, constructivist or collaborative models of education, I think there still tends to be this like, individualized aspect. And there isn’t always like a true sense in which the space of the classroom is co-created, co-constructed by the community that we are all a part of… the professor and the students. That’s the sort of overall approach that I took to the challenge of the question.

John: How do you sell this to students? Because that’s an approach that they may not be familiar with based on their past educational experience.

Rebecca S.: Yeah, this is always, I think, a really big challenge, especially when you’re trying to do something that’s sort of radically different, and you want to do it in 16 weeks, and they’ve had years and years of education going against it. I also do things with games and play and game-based learning. And I actually have found that cultivating an attitude of playfulness can go a really long way towards breaking down some of the ways of being that students have been sort of trained to be in in the classroom. And so I think that there’s a way in which, if I can open students up to laughing and having fun, and just getting in a different kind of physical and mental space, then can sort of start to chip away at some of that. And I don’t think it’s possible to do in one semester. This is another thing about the problems with stereotypes. There’s not some magic pedagogy that’s going to eliminate racism, you have to accept the limits of what we can do in one class as one instructor for one semester. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I really like some of the work that you’ve been doing related to games in the classroom. And we’re hoping that you might expand upon that a bit. And one of the things that struck me about… I think it was a blog post that you wrote about Dungeons and Dragons in the classroom… that you talked about how the people participating in the game, create the world and create the experience together, and that the knowledge of the space is created together. And it seems really tied to the work that you have posed in Picture a Professor. Can you tell us a little bit about how you’re using Dungeons and Dragons to teach ethics?

Rebecca S.: For me, when I first played Dungeons and Dragons, I was in my 30s already. I’m not one of these like lifers forever with DnD, but I realized how many parallels there were with the players and the Dungeon Master and the teachers and the student, because the Dungeon Master has a particular role to play, or the Game Master in a role-playing game. And it’s an importantly different role than the role that the players have. And I think the same is true, it’s not that the teacher and the student are the same in the classroom. But what’s really exciting about role-playing games, or at least tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, is that what the game is about, like what the values are… Is this going to be a game where we mostly focus on strategy and try to get as much money as possible to buy all the cool weapons or whatever? …like, that’s one way the game could go? Or is this like going to be a funny game where we’re just like joking around and getting into high jinks and whatever, are we going to explore some really serious things with identity and characters, like all of those things can be a Dungeons and Dragons game or a role-playing game. And it’s not something that can be dictated from the Game Master. It’s something that comes together through the creative, collaborative storytelling of the game itself. And so I think that there’s just so many parallels with teaching, where the teacher does know more things, and does have a responsibility to make sure that everyone’s involved, everyone’s included, everyone’s enjoying, everyone’s achieving the goals. There’s a certain responsibility of the teacher or the Game Master. And there’s a certain kind of knowledge and a certain kind of expertise. But what the game is, is fundamentally co-created,

John: Do you use that directly or indirectly to help share your teaching philosophy with students?

Rebecca S.: I do always try to share with students why we’re doing what we’re doing. And I’m trying to be intentional about making transparent, especially when we’re doing something weird.you knowe… I’m like, okay, alright, come on, like, you guys, humor me, we’re gonna try this thing. It may totally fail, but we’re gonna try it. So I’ll often talk to students about my teaching philosophy. I’m not sure that I’ve ever actually made that particular idea explicit, and maybe I should. So I think it’s more implicit. But now you’ve made me think that I probably ought to make it explicit.

John: Or maybe have them think about it and make the connections themselves.

Rebecca: Can you talk about how Dungeons and Dragons has unfolded in your ethics class, and what that assignment or activity actually look like?

Rebecca S.: So the way that I’ve constructed it now is that it’s the last four weeks or so of the semester. So it’s after we’ve covered a bunch of material. My dream is to figure out a way to make it the whole semester, but I haven’t quite gotten there yet. So we have several units and we study different philosophers, different ethical theories. So we do Aristotle and we do Mozi, an ancient Chinese philosopher, we do have Simone de Beauvoir and existentialists, they see a bunch of different ethical theories. And then for the last four weeks of the class, in groups, they create a character based on one of the philosophers that we’ve studied or one of the theoretical frameworks that we’ve studied. And so they have to come up with a backstory, like what kinds of experiences would someone have that would lead them to have an existentialist ethics or like, what kind of a person would be a Kantian and they have to pick a class. So they’re like, would Beauvoir be a wizard or a Paladin or whatever. And so they have to pick a class. And then they create their character. And in Dungeons and Dragons, there’s an alignment system. I have my own kind of alignment system, so they have to say whether they’re more focused on contextual factors or universal principles, that they have to pick their alignment for their character. And then we play the game. So I describe a scenario and then they have to say what choices their characters would make in a given situation. So I’m like, okay, you’ve all been called here by the Queen whose son has been kidnapped, and she sends you off to go rescue her son. So they’re all like, “Yes.” But then as they’re leaving the towns, and people say, “Actually, we don’t like the queen, we don’t want a monarchy.” And then they have to decide like, “Okay, do we save the queen’s son, which we made a promise to do, but that’s going to perpetuate the monarchy or do we help these rebels who want to bring in democracy.” And so there’s different decision points along the way, and they have to decide what their characters would do. And then they write reflections at the end of each day of the game, where they say, what decisions they thought fit well with the ethical theories and which ones they think could have been better and why. So they do some post-game reflection.

Rebecca: How have students responded to this kind of an experience?

Rebecca S.: So I’ve done some surveys and things just to ask students, and I don’t think I’ve really gotten anything really negative, everyone seems to think it’s fun. They say that it’s really helpful as a review and as application of the ideas. Some of the students get super into it. So that’s always fun. And I think that’s true with any activity you do. Like, you’re always going to have those students that are just like, “This is my thing” and run with it. So that’s really fun. And those students are not always the students that are necessarily the most engaged in the other parts of the class. And I think that’s really a benefit too of doing these kinds of different sorts of activities, because you have a student that maybe hasn’t had positive experiences with academics so far, but they hear Dungeons and Dragons and they’re just ready to go. And then even the students that are not as familiar with it, they have fun with it, too. And some of them kind of get into it unexpectedly. I also don’t force anyone to play. So one representative from each group plays each day, but I always make sure everybody has the chance to play, but they have the option if they just want to observe and do the reflections, that’s fine. So I think that helps with some of the potential discomfort that some students might have. But what I find overall is that the humor of it is really interesting, and really solidifying of both knowledge and community. So for example… I think I talked about this in the blog post, because this is just my favorite example… but I had a student who was playing a character inspired by Kant, and one of Kant’s principles is you’re never allowed to lie. And so they were sneaking into this goblin cave and the Kant characters, like, “I can’t sneak, it’s a lie, it’s deceptive.” So he goes in and announces that they have arrived at the goblin cave, and everybody laughs because everybody’s in on the joke, because everyone knows that Kant says, “You’re not allowed to lie.” And so there’s this kind of inside humor that is possible. That really is like, “Oh, we learned something this semester, we all now get this Kant joke that, at the beginning of the semester, no one would have understood.” It creates this sort of in-group thing, but not in a negative way. But like a positive way, like we’ve all learned this together. And we have this shared humor now. That I think is really fun.

John: In one of your tweets, you mentioned that you were planning a course that would involve some world building, could you tell us a little bit about that?

Rebecca S.: So I agreed to do some pedagogy through world building for this book that’s going to be coming out. It’s for a case study for the book. And it may or may not actually even be included in the book, but a bunch of faculty are doing some world building and writing about it, and then we’ll see what happens with the book project. So I agreed to do that. And then I’m also doing this class for the Social Justice Studies program. So I was like, “How can I match these up?” And so I was thinking about how to teach with world building, and the first thing that came to my mind is Plato’s Republic. So Plato’s Republic is a dialogue by Plato where he is exploring the concept of justice and he imagines this ideal city that ends up not being ideal in the end, but he’s trying to envision what would justice look like in this city and so he creates this world with its own myths, and with its own laws and rules and education system and marital practices. So I was thinking that it would be fun if we started with Plato, and then had students create their own just world where we think about what is justice? And what would justice look like in all these ways. This is the plan so far… there’s a site called World Anvil that is a world building site that people use for making role playing games, but also novels and things like that. And it’s kind of like a wiki. So essentially, the students are going to be creating a wiki of their world. And so we’ll have to decide what we want to focus on, because obviously, we can’t do everything. So we’ll have to think like, do they want to talk about education systems, do they want to talk about criminal justice systems, do they want to talk about religion? So they could come up with their pantheon of deities, if they want. What would religion look like in a just society? Would everyone have the same religion? Would there be no religion? The topics will be student led, I’m going to have a list that they can pick from, then the readings will be determined by like, we decided to do religion, and I’ll give them some readings, and then the assignment will be to build that part of the wiki, the religion part. And recently, I just started thinking, we’re not going to get very far in one semester. So what if this was like a project that the next time I teach this class, they take up, and we keep building the world. So, it may end up being a long project where each class picks up where the last class left off, which I think would be really cool. This is still in the planning stage,… the next couple of months to really nail it down. But that’s where I’m at so far. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I really love the idea because it involves students in a lot of decision making, and really contemplating the ideas about social justice. So they would need to have some background knowledge, and then have discussions and co-create and co-decide on things and so it seems like a much more active way of engaging with the material, then maybe a traditional paper or other kinds of activities, like quizzes and stuff might have.

Rebecca S.: Yeah, and I think having this project, it’s kind of problem-based learning, in a sense, I guess. It’s a little bit different. But having that sort of shared project, I think, also hopefully will create a different kind of engagement and motivation.

John: It sounds fascinating. Can we go back, though, to your chapter in Picture a Professor? You’ve talked a little bit about vulnerability and how you share that. But could you talk a little bit about how you build metacognition into your classes.

Rebecca S.: So philosophy classes in general focus a lot on class discussions. And I think sometimes students think, “Well, what do I really learn from a discussion?” So going back to this idea of the professor is the one that has the knowledge, like, “Well, I’m here to learn from the professor and not from my classmates…” or they think that a discussion is just saying things, just whatever comes up, and I promise this is going to get to metacognition. And so what I focused on a lot is thinking about how to improve class discussions and how to help students think about what they’re learning from class discussions, by thinking about conversations in terms of academic moves. I didn’t invent this idea, but I’ve really tried to take it and develop it. So this idea that when you contribute to a discussion, you’re not just saying something, you’re asking a clarification question, or you’re posing a hypothetical, or you’re disagreeing with someone, or you’re agreeing with someone and saying why, or you’re connecting to your own experience, right? So there’s these specific things that you’re doing. You’re not just saying things, you’re doing things in a conversation. And from a social justice perspective, you can also do things like welcome someone into the conversation with a question or exclude someone or silence someone. So the idea that saying things does things is, I think, one of the most important ideas I want students to come away with. So I do a lot of work with having students identify what moves they’re making in a conversation and thinking about and reflecting on what kinds of moves are most productive, or are there any moves that we don’t want to make, like fallacy or ad hominem, like illegal move. But having students reflect specifically on what sort of contributions they’re making or how they’re moving a conversation forward. And this is not just for conversations, but also for writing, or you can also identify moves that people are making when you’re reading a text. And this is also a way of recognizing the communal nature of knowledge because one of the move can be to thank someone for helping you see something in a new way. Like that’s a move too, like showing gratitude to someone else, or acknowledging someone’s contribution or summarizing what someone else said or asking them to clarify. So there’s a lot of different activities that might be involved, but they’re all about sort of metacognitively reflecting on academic discourse, whether that’s written or spoken, and specifically identifying the ways in which we see through that, that this is us together creating a community rather than each individual person gaining knowledge on their own.

John: So how do you implement that specifically in terms of students reflecting on that? Do you have them engage in a conversation and then reflect back on their participation? Or are there other techniques that you use?

Rebecca S.: Yeah, I’ve tried a bunch of different things. So I’ve tried a game version, where it have the different moves on cards. And it’s an idea I got from Ann Cahill at Elon University. So she actually had a deck of these cards. And then I’ve tried that where I deal out the cards, and then they have to look for an opportunity to play their specific move. And that works kind of okay, but I haven’t had complete success with that, because students often find it difficult to find the moment for their card, or they want to say something and they don’t have the card for it or whatever. So I think that’s fun as a way of introducing it and practicing it, but it can interrupt the flow of the conversation some. What I did recently in an online class this past semester, is I actually divided the moves into different levels. So things like “connect your own experience,” most students can do that relatively right away. Whereas “identifying unstated assumption” like that’s a really hard move that takes a lot of work and practice. So for their first paper, I use Perusall, and so they comment on the text and respond to each other. But in their responses to one another, they have to identify the move that they’re making. So they’re responding to a classmate and they’re saying, “Okay, I’m going to agree and give a new reason. I’m going to disagree and explain why or I’m going to propose a hypothetical or whatever.” So I have them actually, in their discussion posts, identify the move that they’re making before they make the move. So that’s one way I’ve done it. And then I’ve also just done some things where I have them just write reflections on the discussion and identify moves that have been made or moves that haven’t been made, and why haven’t those moves been made? So things like that, also.

John: Do you have them use tags in Perusall for the types of moves that they make?

Rebecca S.: That’s a good idea, I have not, I only a very basic Perusall user. I was using Discord for awhile. And this is really fun, I actually had to make custom emojis for the different moves. So that was a fun activity at the beginning where they had to come up with an image to associate with the moves, it didn’t really play out fully in terms of the way that I envisioned it. But I think there’s still promise with that approach as well, I just need to pursue it more.

Rebecca: I like the idea of actively having to be conscious of what kind of move you’re making while you’re making it. That does seem like it may work a little bit better in an asynchronous environment where people have time to think about what move [LAUGHTER] they’re making, rather than in a synchronous context. When you were talking about conversations, it was reminding me of a really interesting conversation that we had, on our campus, with our workgroup on accessibility practices, with some students with disabilities, who identified that conversation, like classes that focused on discussion, felt really inaccessible to them or were hard to follow because they were having a hard time pulling out what to take away from the conversation. So you led this little segment about that. So it made me start thinking about how could we slow things down a little bit to be a little more cognizant of what we’re doing and maybe give time to digest what’s happening rather than the rapid fire and not being able to keep up. Although it maybe isn’t a natural flow of conversation, it does make you think more about what it is that you’re doing before you’re acting.

Rebecca S.: Yeah, that’s a really great point. Now that you mention it, I do think that it is often more successful in asynchronous classes. And in the synchronous classes, it’s often more of a after-the-fact reflection, but I think that it could be useful to have students plan out their moves in advance of the class. It’s like in preparation for the synchronous discussion and then, see then maybe not just like, here’s your card, make your move. And everyone’s like, “I don’t know, you have to pose a hypothetical right now?” But if everyone knew the moves that they were supposed to make in the class that day in advance, I think that would actually work really well. So I’m going to steal that and do that. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, that might be interesting. I think one really good accessibility practice for any kind of presentation or activity is for people to know what’s going to be expected of them in advance so that they do have time to think so I’d be interested to hear, whether or not if you do that, how that plays out. So I know inclusivity is important to you. Can you talk a little bit about how some of the practices that we’ve been discussing today promote inclusivity? Or the ways that you think about setting up activities to make sure that people feel included?

Rebecca S.: Yeah, so I’ve been thinking a lot about inclusivity and creativity and vulnerability and playfulness. And I think it’s always tricky, because I think that sometimes we have this idea that there’s some sort of ideally accessible and inclusive class, that if we just keep opening and opening and opening and opening that somehow eventually it will include everyone equally. And I don’t think that that’s possible, because I think that when you really get into the concrete details of things, something that works really well for one student might be more difficult for another student, and how do you balance and weigh these kinds of complicated decisions? Nothing is ever just straightforwardly more accessible or more inclusive, I don’t think. So, I think it’s much more complicated than that. So the way I’ve been thinking about it is actually through a philosopher that I mentioned in a Chapter, Jose Medina, his book is called Epistemology of Resistance. And he talks about the need for epistemic friction. He talks a lot about the ways in which people who have a lot of privilege don’t encounter enough epistemic friction. So there’s this way in which things are too smooth and too easy, and you’re not challenged enough. There’s not enough resistance that you face if you have a lot of privilege. And he talks about the kinds of… I don’t want to say benefits, because that’s not quite right… but, the ways in which having a marginalized or oppressed identity can create the opportunity for developing certain virtues, certain epistemic virtues, not to say that it’s a good thing, like, obviously, it’s a bad thing. But what he does is he kind of flips things on its head where he says, we often think about privilege as benefiting people who have privilege. But there’s also ways in which privilege isolate you and prevent you from being able to know things or learn things or develop certain skills. So to get back to inclusivity, I’ve been thinking about being a teacher is about managing epistemic friction. So the idea that at certain times, certain students in certain contexts actually need a little more friction, and certain students need a little less friction. And so rather than thinking about creating some ideally open space, it’s about managing the kinds of friction that students run into. So some kinds of friction are unjust and should not exist. They’re not even friction, they’re just obstacles. But some kinds of things that are difficult or uncomfortable or challenging can be really good and beneficial for learning. But it’s really tricky to know which students need what and you always have to be very careful about presuming that you know what students need, of course, but I’ve been thinking about designing classes in terms of eliminating unjust epistemic friction, but creating opportunities for certain other kinds of friction, and thinking about accessibility in terms of that, like, is this a productive kind of challenge? Or is this an unfair or unjust kind of challenge? Because it’s not about whether it’s difficult or not. Learning is difficult. It’s like, is it the right kind of difficulty? Is it the right kind of challenge? Is it fair and just and promoting of the learning rather than the opposite of that, if that makes sense.

Rebecca: I like the word choice that used of obstacle versus a challenge. An obstacle is something that it shouldn’t be there… [LAUGHTER] versus a challenge is something that we would hope students actually do experience as students, because challenges can help us learn.

John: How do you set students up for this, because some of those discussions could be somewhat challenging for people who don’t want to have their beliefs challenged, who have really deep beliefs, and are resistant to learning new things, [LAUGHTER] or new experiences.

Rebecca S.: This is where I think that modeling some epistemic vulnerability is really important and humility. And so, for instance, I teach critical thinking, and I had this activity all designed, and I was excited about it and I thought it was gonna be great. And it was terrible. And I said to the students, at the end, I was like, “Well, that didn’t work at all. Like that was a disaster.” And then I’m like, “okay,” then it was like, “You guys, I have another class in 15 minutes. I have another section.” I’m like, “Quick, what do I do? How do I make this better? How do I save the next class from this terrible disaster?” It wasn’t that terrible, but it was just awkward and didn’t really work. And then they were like, “Oh, well, the problem is that you thought that we wanted to talk about these things. But we actually don’t care about these issues that you think we care about. We want to talk about these other things like ‘Do aliens exist?’ or whatever.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” So in the next class, they ended up debating whether a hot dog was a sandwich. And I thought, this is so silly. Why are we talking about this? But they got really into it. And I told the next class, by the way, the last class sucked, and I changed everything. So here we go on the fly. And so I let them know that I made a mistake or I was wrong. I miscalculated how things would go and I made a change. And now we’re going to try it. And at the end of that class, there was this student and he had changed his mind about whether a hot dog was a sandwich. And he was really resisting admitting that he changed his mind. And so it was just like, I’ll call him John. John. His name’s not John. So I’m like, “John, you were wrong about whether a hot dog was a sandwich. He was like, “No.” John, you were wrong, right? And then everyone’s like, he wouldn’t say it, and I’m like, “Can you say ‘I was wrong?’” …but it’s really funny at this point, everybody’s laughing. And then finally he stands up. And he says, “I was wrong about whether a hot dog was a sandwich.” And everybody laughed and laughed. And I feel like it’s a really tiny way to admit that you’re wrong. But for me to admit times when I’m wrong, and then to celebrate students when they are willing to change their mind, even about something silly, it’s not going to get people to be totally open to changing their mind about controversial topics by the end of 16 weeks, or whatever. But it’s like, a little opening into practicing that habit of being willing to say, “Yeah, I was wrong about that.”

John: That reminds me of a podcast I listened to recently, I think it was Planet Money, or Planet Money Indicator, where one of the issues they were discussing is whether a burrito is a sandwich or not, because in New York State that affects its taxable status. So, it was actually a major political issue.

Rebecca S.: That’s so funny. I’m actually having my critical thinking students debate whether hot dogs are sandwiches right now in my asynchronous class, and actually, there’s not enough friction at the moment. They’re all like, “Yes, the hot dog is a sandwich, because it’s meat between two pieces of bread.” And I’m like, “No, the whole point is for us to practice disagreeing with each other.” So maybe I can throw in the podcast, or I can find some article.

John: I’ll include a link to that in the show notes. You discuss vulnerability a few times, might that be a little bit risky for a younger female professor in terms of the known biases that exists in terms of student course evaluations?

Rebecca S.: I think it’s really important for me to say that, yeah, I’m marginalized in the sense that I’m young-ish, female, professor in philosophy in particular, where there’s not a lot of women. There’s also things that I can do that other faculty can’t do. I have a lot of privileges as well. And I’m white and certain personality things, I think I can, like, get away with things. Everybody’s different. I don’t think there’s any wrong way necessarily, I’m not saying everybody should do what I do at all. I don’t think that that’s true. But at the beginning I was talking about what felt authentic to me. I think I needed to find a way to be able to be myself in the classroom. And so I don’t think that I can give some sort of universal prescription that will work for everyone. And I do think it’s risky. But I also think that the risks are unavoidable. I was saying before, that we’re not going to eliminate sexism or racism, oppression in the classroom, because our classes are part of the world. And those things exist in the world. So while I think it’s risky, I also think that it’s just risky to exist, [LAUGHTER] and that we are vulnerable, whether or not we want to admit it. This actually comes from Judith Butler, but there’s not really like whether we are or aren’t vulnerable. It’s just how do we manage our vulnerability. And so I think it’s not even necessarily about being more vulnerable. It’s just a different way of managing the inevitable vulnerability of being human. And being a teacher is super vulnerable. Being students also, humans are vulnerable, and that’s beautiful and scary. And so I probably framed it in terms of more or less, but when I think about it, I don’t actually think it’s about more or less vulnerability. It’s like, how do we manage it? Do we acknowledge it? Do we not acknowledge it? And I don’t think necessarily that we need to acknowledge it all the time. And different people are going to have different ways of thinking about it. But I do think it’s important to acknowledge epistemic vulnerability to a certain extent, because I think that it’s true that no one knows everything. And I think it’s harmful to perpetuate an idea that there is some sort of place you’re going to get to where you don’t need to continue learning. So I do think that epistemic vulnerability is important to acknowledge; other kinds of vulnerability, I think, may or may not be, it depends on the person.

John: And I would think it would also help to nurture a growth mindset in students when you acknowledge this epistemic vulnerability, letting them know that that’s just a normal part of learning, that there are many things they don’t know, but they can get there.

Rebecca S.: I share with them sometimes my own experiences of writing a dissertation and how difficult it is to get critical feedback. I don’t think necessarily everyone needs to do that. But I think that, for me, opening up a discussion where if I’m about to give them feedback on their writing, talking about what it’s like for me to get feedback on my writing and how that can be hard. And here’s sort of what I do when I’m about to read comments on something. Sometimes I need to take a minute. So, there’s ways of sharing that depending on your comfort level, but I do really think that acknowledging our humanity can be a really good and powerful thing.

John: We know you teach in a community college with a very high teaching load. And you mentioned you have a baby in the background there. But you also are playing with a band and you’ve released your fourth album, how do you record with a band and create music while also being a full-time faculty member with a heavy teaching load?

Rebecca S.: I’ve no idea. [LAUGHTER] No, I, you know, don’t sleep… No. Well, to be honest, and talking about, like acknowledging humanity and vulnerability, the last year has been incredibly difficult with a new baby. And it has been really, really, really hard. I have done it somehow. But I don’t actually think that the last year has been my best year of teaching, having a new baby. And I think that acknowledging that that’s okay, I’m still doing the best that I can, and things are going to get better now, both like daycare, and like, whatever, having a lot of support. I mean, you don’t do these things alone, also, I think. And so, I mean, I’m really lucky to have my husband who largely works from home. And he’s takes care of the baby a lot of the time, and he’s also in the band, and then having the ability to get a babysitter sometimes. So there’s a lot of ways in which the way that it works is the result of luck, and privilege and support. But then also, I think that if you’re doing things that you really care about, and that you love, you try to find ways to make it work and you just find ways to be more efficient. And like with teaching, one of the things I’ve realized is my impulse to want to reinvent everything all the time is not always what serves students the best. And so thinking about what I want to do, because I’m really excited about some new idea, sometimes doing the thing that I’ve done a million times that I know works is actually better for students and for me. And so thinking about that, too, like, my approach to teaching was always like, “Oh my God, every semester, I’m gonna do something wild and crazy and completely different, every single time.” And it’s unsustainable for me, but it doesn’t actually serve students. So I still do my experiments, and I think I always will, but I think being more deliberate. Okay, I’m going to take on this one project, I’m going to redesign this one class…

Rebecca: …and not like ten?

Rebecca S.: and not all of them.

John: And not redesign everything in the class, which I think Rebecca and I also have a tendency to try to do.

Rebecca: Yes, I’m trying to be more sustainable, my new approach.

Rebecca S.: And I think that oftentimes, it is better for students, I think that sometimes it might not be exciting for me, but it’s their first time experiencing it. And so I think that’s important to keep in mind.

Rebecca: Or you rotate between the things that you’ve invented, so that you stay interested, they’re still well established.

John: And the second time you do things you often have learned from past attempts at doing them, and they often result in better learning outcomes for students.

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

Rebecca S.: Yeah, so I guess I’ve already talked a little bit about what’s next in terms of like this world building class I’m working on. I’m also writing a bit about my role-playing game for ethics. I’m also working on something more about cultivating playfulness. So I’m interested in thinking more about exactly what it is about playfulness that I think is so meaningful and important and how that can be serious play. So I’m really interested in thinking more about these connections between playfulness, creativity, and inclusivity.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

John: It does, and are you working on your next album?

Rebecca S.: Not yet. It just came out June 10. So we take a long time to write songs. So expect another one in like four or five years. [LAUGHTER]

John: We were doing a little bit of research on your work, and I ended up spending a lot of that time listening to music while Rebecca was actually reading your blog posts. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca S.: Nice. Awesome.

John: I enjoyed it, it was really nice. Thank you.

Rebecca S.: Thank you.

John: Well, thank you. It was really great talking to you.

Rebecca S.: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was awesome.

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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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238. Engaged Teaching

The past two years have been challenging for teachers to navigate and be excited about. In this episode, Claire Howell Major joins us to discuss what it means to be an engaged teacher as well as practical resources to support teachers on their journey. Claire is a Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership Policy and Technology Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author or co-author of several superb books and resources on teaching and learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The past two years have been challenging for teachers to navigate and be excited about. In this episode, we discuss what it means to be an engaged teacher as well as practical resources to support teachers on their journey.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Claire Howell Major. Claire is a Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership Policy and Technology Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author or co-author of several superb books on teaching and learning. Welcome back, Claire.

Claire: Thanks, I’m delighted to be here, John and Rebecca. Thanks for having me again. My second time, so yay.

Rebecca: Love it!

John: We’re really happy to have you back again. And our teas today are… Claire, are you drinking tea?

Claire: I am not. I’m drinking water.

Rebecca: John. I have a supreme English breakfast today.

Claire: Nice. Good choice.

John: Supreme as in?

Rebecca: It’s supreme.

John: Okay, we’ll leave it at that, and I have an Irish breakfast today. So part of the same empire there.

Rebecca: Yeah… [LAUGHTER]

John: That supreme empire.

Rebecca: I was going to say, is it very supreme? [LAUGHTER]

John: It is just Twinings Irish breakfast.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss Engaged Teaching: A Handbook for College Faculty, your newest book, co-authored with Elizabeth Barkley, and its relationship with the K. Patricia Cross Academy. Could you first tell us a little bit about the creation of the K. Patricia Cross Academy?

Claire: Sure Rebecca, I would be delighted to. The Cross Academy is a resource that Elizabeth and I developed, in part, to honor Pat Cross, and her many, many contributions to higher education. Pat had just an amazing career in higher education that started really in about the mid 50s. And she finished her work in the mid 90s. And she served in a ton of high level administrative positions: at Cornell, at Berkeley, and at Harvard. And these were really high level positions at a time where it was pretty difficult for women to get high level positions. And she just did an amazing job and was really respected for her work as an administrator, but also for her work as a researcher. And you probably know her Classroom Assessment Techniques with Tom Angelo. It’s a fabulous book that shares formative classroom assessment techniques, and it has been used far and wide. I use it myself on a regular basis, and it’s been around for a long time and is still just a great tool. In that book, Pat and Tom developed a format for the assessment techniques that Elizabeth, Pat, and I used when we co-authored our first book together, Collaborative Learning Techniques. And it also served as the model for several of our later books, including Student Engagement Techniques, Interactive Lecturing, and Learning Assessment Techniques. And those techniques became the basis and the foundation for the Cross Academy. So that’s where it came from, but in addition to honoring Pat for her work, we also wanted to share information with faculty. We wanted to make some of these techniques a lot more accessible, so people didn’t have to necessarily go buy a book. That they could go to an online resource and pull that information anytime, anywhere, and also for free. We just wanted an open resource that could help faculty, and help faculty in short chunks. Each of our videos is about two to three minutes, and so it’s not a huge investment of time to go watch two or three minutes of video to get a great technique that faculty can try out in their own courses, and hopefully find a good use for. So our purpose there was twofold, to honor Pat and her work and also to widely share information that her work was foundational for, and we developed it from there and wanted to share that information with others.

John: At the teaching center here, we shared many resources with our faculty during the course of the pandemic. But the one that was most appreciated by faculty, based on the number of responses, was the K. Patricia Cross Academy resources. People wrote back saying how very useful it was, and how they wished they had seen it earlier and it’s gotten a lot of really positive responses here on campus, and I’m sure everywhere.

Claire: Well, thank you for that, John. I’m just delighted to hear it. It just warms my heart to hear that your faculty have enjoyed it. We have had a lot of visitors to the site, over 200,000 at this point. So I do think we are accomplishing that goal of sharing information with faculty. And we’re always just delighted, and so pleased to hear that people are finding it useful. That they are using the techniques in their own classes… so, just great news.

John: There’s so many other resources out there that describe some of the techniques that you have there, but they’re usually text based with maybe some images, or there may be a YouTube video or there may be some handouts attached to the text and so forth. But what people seem to really appreciate with this, and what we really appreciate with this is… you’ve got all those resources together in a really nice efficient arrangement. And you’ve devised a site where it’s really easy to find this material. You have a number of ways of indexing it. Could you talk a little bit about the ways in which people can access the information on the site?

Claire: Sure, sure. The site currently consists of 50 main videos, and each video is focused on a single teaching technique. For example, quick writes, or digital stories, or case studies and so on, and all of these techniques can be sorted in several different ways. You can search by the activity type, is it an assessment technique? Or is it a group learning technique? You can sort by the problem that it solves, for example, are you having trouble with student engagement? Are you having trouble with student attention? You can sort that way, and you can sort by Dee Finks’ learning taxonomy. So is it for foundational knowledge you’re trying to use the technique for? Are you trying to help students develop higher-order thinking skills? Are you trying to help students learn how to learn? And so the site is sortable in all those different ways, but it’s not just those 50 techniques. Each of those 50 techniques also has an online version. So we developed 50 additional videos, where we say, “Okay, here’s what a jigsaw is,” in the main video. And then in the accompanying video for how to do it online, we would say, “Here’s how you do a jigsaw in an online course.” So we have 100 videos really, because each of the 50 has the online version. And in addition to the videos, because you know, I’m pretty much a text-based person. I love to read, I love to see things in writing, I love books, all of those things. But we also have the techniques in downloadable templates. So in addition to watching the video, you can download a written version that gives you the quick and dirty of: here’s how you do it… provides the rationale for it. It gives an example of how it’s done in practice, a lot of times those examples come from my courses or Elizabeth’s courses. But there’s also worksheets space for faculty to record their own answers. And we also have a blog on the Cross Academy site, which we call CrossCurrents. And the blog publishes monthly, and we have different write ups each month of things that are timely and topical for teaching. And so we might discuss blended learning, for example, in a video or a blog, or another blog might be: “here’s how you can get students to read for class.” So we have all those different features in the Academy.

Rebecca: I love that everything is so bite sized, so that you can curate your own kind of collection of things to share as well so easily because the examples aren’t embedded in other examples. Which is sometimes you know, you might have a video or a workshop on good techniques, but then they’re all in the same thing. You can kind of separate them out, which is really nice. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Yes, thanks Rebecca. We think so too, and part of that is, we know how busy we are. I mean, gosh, right now especially, faculty are just overwhelmed with teaching, with research, with service, with whatever we’re doing. And it feels like now it’s even more so than, say, pre-pandemic, because there’s so much more emotional labor to engage in. And it’s just a lot of work. So how do you find time to work on your teaching, and that’s one of the things we wanted to do is make everything easily accessible, like I said, where you could learn something new in two to three minutes, or a five- or ten-minute read of a blog post or something like that. So the goal is to make it manageable, and very, very useful and very practical.

Rebecca: And such a great model for what we should be doing for our students.

John: One thing I do have to wonder, though, given what you just said about all the challenges that faculty are facing is… how you’ve been able to stay so incredibly productive with all of these books. I think you’ve written more really good books on teaching and learning than most faculty have ever read.

Claire: Well, thank you. I think that’s a compliment, [LAUGHTER] I’m gonna take it as one.

John: It is. I’m really amazed. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Please teach us the ways. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: I think there are maybe a couple of reasons for that. One, I have a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in English. So my background is in English, and in English you learn to write a lot and you learn to write quickly, right? [LAUGHTER] Or at least in my degree programs that was one of the features, but the other thing is that, maybe because of that degree is, I process by writing. I learn things by writing. It’s how I take in information and understand the world. So a lot of the books I’ve written and co-authored with Elizabeth and other people. You’ve met Todd, and Michael and some of the other folks that I’ve worked with, just wonderful, fabulous folks, but one of the things that I think I try to do is learn something. And when I’m learning something, I’m usually writing stuff down about it, and by the time I’ve written all the stuff down that I’ve learned, then I think, “Well, I can just share this with other people,” right? I’ve done all this work to try to understand something myself, to think through it. That’s something I can share with others, and that’s certainly how the first book that Elizabeth, Pat, and I developed together, the Collaborative Learning Techniques, came about. I was really struggling with collaborative learning. It is hard to do that well. But the benefits are worth it because the research is really clear on that. It helps students learn, it helps develop their learning outcomes, it helps them get along with each other, it helps increase understanding and awareness, it really benefits marginalized students, it benefits not marginalized students. I mean, the research is really clear that it is a fabulous technique. And so I just wanted to learn how to do it and learn how to do it well, and so I started digging into everything I could get my hands on, and trying to pull it together, and synthesizing it. And I talked with Pat Cross about it, and Pat said, “You know, we should use that classroom assessment technique format for this book. And by the way, Elizabeth Barkley is going to be writing this book with us,” and that’s how that got started. Anyway, I think that’s mainly it. It’s me trying to learn and I’m on a constant quest for trying to learn new things, and I just try to share that information when I can.

John: And we all benefit from that . Thank you.

Claire: Thank you.

Rebecca: So glad you’re so curious. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Yeah, I guess so. I guess I’m curious or motivated by challenges that I’m facing. So either way, either way.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how Engaged Teaching, your new book, relates to the Academy?

Claire: Yes. So I think there are a lot of different ways it relates, but I’ll say this, we wanted to write a foundational, or introductory book for college teaching. So one of the things I try to do in my work is, I’ve mentioned how busy faculty are, I want to put theory and research into the faculty’s hands in ways they can use it to improve their own teaching and learning. And those have been narrow slices, like collaborative learning, like learning assessment techniques, like interactive lecturing, some of those things are pretty focused. And so Elizabeth and I were talking about it, and we decided that it would be really useful to have a foundational text that does basically that. That draws together the theory and the research, but we’re both very, very practical people. We want things that help faculty in their day-to-day practices, that they can take away immediately and use something from. So we had the Cross Academy that have those takeaways. You can use this in your class tomorrow, watch this video, take it to your class tomorrow, or take it to your class in an hour. But we wanted to provide the theory and the research that supports that and some of the broader practical tips. So that’s kind of how it came into being. That we wanted this broader foundational book to give the techniques some context, and to give it some foundation and some grounding in the work. So they do talk to each other. Like I said, the book is the foundation, and the techniques are the very practical: “Here’s how you carry it out.” Although the book has that too, the practice parts, but it’s bigger practice, it’s more like a general tip. Whereas one of the tips might be, “Use small groups in your teaching,” and then the techniques are, “Hey, use a jigsaw,” or “Hey, try a think, pair, share.” So they are connected that way.

John: And you describe those linkages in the book and have a table of how those techniques tie back into the chapters to make it easier to do that cross referencing.

Claire: Yes, that’s right. And we mention the techniques within the chapters where we find them particularly relevant. Many of them can cut across a lot of different chapters. But if you’re reading the chapter on collaborative learning, we mentioned techniques that are on the Cross Academy site that are focused on group learning, and so forth.

John: The title of the book begins with “Engaged Teaching.” How do you define engaged teaching?

Claire: That’s a really good question and I think engaged teaching is a really interesting and important concept right now. You read things in The Chronicle of Higher Education… faculty are disengaged, students are disengaged, etc, etc… I’m not sure I believe that exactly. I know we’re tired, right? [LAUGHTER] I know that we’ve dealt with some things through the pandemic, and it’s taken a toll. But I think the engagement is still there, and I think to be really effective teachers starts with being an engaged teacher. One leads to the other. Being engaged can get you to be effective. So I think of engaged teaching as two things, it’s a foundation and also a process. And the foundation is an intellectual foundation. And that involves the knowing what, the knowing why, and the knowing how, and that’s how each of our chapters is structured. Every chapter you’ll read there’s a “what this topics’ about,” “why this topic is important” (largely drawing on the research), and then “how you can do this particular thing in practice.” So that’s the foundation, the intellectual part of that. And the process is implementing that in key areas of teaching and the key steps that we have to undergo. And that is developing our own knowledge. It means planning a course, it means creating a positive learning climate and choosing and using the appropriate instructional methods. And it also involves continual improvement of our teaching practice. So it’s going through each of those phases of teaching and thinking through the knowing what, the knowing why, and the knowing how.

Rebecca: When I think about engaged teaching, and as you’re describing things, Claire, I also think about reflective practice and how they’re tied together. And the idea that you have to observe what you’re doing to be fully engaged, or take time to reflect on that, to really dig into the research or to know what techniques you want to look into, or to recognize that you’re struggling with something.

Claire: Right, and I think that’s a key point. And I think the idea of reflective practice is kind of an overarching idea of the book. But we also have a chapter on that, on being a reflective teacher and using reflective practice in your teaching. So absolutely, they are definitely related.

John: For our listeners who have not yet picked up a copy of the book, could you provide an overview of the different sections of the book?

Claire: Sure, part one is about foundations of teaching and learning. And in that we start with engaged and effective teaching, and what engaged teaching means, and how that can lead you to effective teaching. We also think through pedagogical content knowledge, and that’s a specialized kind of knowledge that faculty have that no one else has and it’s really important to develop that, and we think about how to develop that. We also talk about student learning, which I think is really important and it’s something we don’t always have formal instruction on in our graduate programs, or prior to teaching our courses. But we think it’s really essential to understand what your views of learning are, and how students learn, and what can be challenges to student learning, and then how they can overcome those challenges. So it is a very foundational: “Here’s teacher knowledge, here’s student learning, and here’s some things you need to know.” Part two is about planning, and that involves thinking about learning goals, objectives and outcomes, everybody’s favorite, right? But those are more and more essential in today’s society [LAUGHTER] they say. We all have to usually do those for all kinds of reasons. For accreditation purposes, because we have to post our syllabi, and other things, and because it is just a good idea to do. The research shows that it helps improve student learning. If you have this kind of clear path laid out and know where you’re going, it helps you know how to get there. We also, in that section, talk about assessing and grading, and we talk about visual elements in teaching which is, I think, an under-thought-through aspect of teaching, but I think it is important to the planning process. And that could be from your syllabi to your slide decks to your online LMS or whatever. There’s a lot of visual content that we share with students that I think we can improve and really think through and do a good job on. Part three is about the learning climate. We think about student engagement and motivation. We talk about community and how to build community in classes, and we also think through and talk about how to promote equity and inclusion in teaching. Part four is about instructional methods, and we cover three big ones there: interactive lecturing, discussion, and then also collaborative learning. And then finally, in part five, we focus on improvement. And we talk about reflective teaching and assessing and evaluating student teaching from beyond student opinions of instruction, right? Some other ways to go about it. We do talk about student opinions of instruction and some of the challenges with those, and some of the benefits with those, but also thinking beyond that, and other ways to assess and evaluate teaching. And then our final chapter is on the scholarship of teaching and learning, and how we can go that extra step in collecting data, understanding data, and sharing that information with other people.

Rebecca: So basically, the textbook that none of us had when we started teaching. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: That was kind of the idea. Yeah, absolutely. I teach a course on college teaching, and this is what I would want my students to know.

John: And it’s everything from the basic theory of course design, implementation of the course, and looking back and seeing what worked, and what didn’t work, and what you could do better. It’s pretty much everything faculty need to do to become an effective teacher, or an engaged teacher.

Claire: Maybe not everything, but we definitely try to cast a wide net and cover a lot of important topics that we hope will benefit people from thinking through a little bit more.

Rebecca: I really love that this particular text includes an introduction to the scholarship of teaching and learning too, because it’s an area that many of us might want to engage in, but are never really exposed to necessarily, at least early on. You might stumble upon it [LAUGHTER] as opposed to it being like formally introduced.

Claire: Right, right, and there’s so much good work in that area. I mean, that field is really growing, and they’re just more and more articles being published, and I think it’s wonderful because so many times teaching is very isolated. We go behind our closed doors, or we sit behind our screens, and we teach our courses, and it stops there, and our students go out, and that’s wonderful, and carry on. But we may have faculty teaching the same courses at other institutions who never hear anything about what we’re doing, and if we can contribute to that knowledge then we can all get better. It helps us all level up just a little bit to be able to hear what other people are doing, and what’s working, or what’s not working, and to have that data I just think is really great. So I hope people will look at that and think, “Gosh, I could do this. I could go out and do an article on my teaching and share that with others.” I think that would be a fabulous, fabulous outcome.

Rebecca: Can you describe to our listeners, maybe a couple of your favorite teaching techniques or other nuggets from the book?

Claire: That is such a hard question, it’s like choosing your favorite child. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: All right, just an example, just an example, it doesn’t have to be your favorite. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: No, no, I’m gonna give you a couple. I have used, I believe, every single technique we have on the Cross Academy site, and so I have personally field tested them all, and I think Elizabeth has as well. And there are some ones that I turn to over and over and over again. Quick writes are one, I think background knowledge probe is another one, case studies I use quite often. There are two that I turn to, I would say, more often than others. And one is the digital story, and that’s where students create videos, and in these videos they describe how their own personal lives connect to the course content. And I like to use these early in a course to help students introduce themselves to each other, and also because it puts them in a mind frame of understanding, “Oh hey, I do have important knowledge and experience that relates to this course,” and that’s pretty good. And I have seen students just produce really, really wonderful, fabulous stories, and it’s really heartening. They share things and it’s just really powerful to see these. So I do love that one. Another one that I really love is a personal learning environment, and that’s where people have digital resources that they can use to learn more about their course content later on going forward. And it’s basically they create a concept map that’s got nodes and ties to the resources that they could use, and it could be people, it could be websites, it could be books, it could be journals that they’re going to consult going forward. But I often like to end a course by having them develop a PLE where they can say how they can continue to learn about the course content going forward. So those are two of my favorites, I think.

Rebecca: Those are good favorites. I like those two.

Claire: Yeah I like them, they’re good. And they work well both online and on site. So they’ve got some flexibility that way.

Rebecca: Just mentally noting like, “Yes, yes, that would be a really good way to end my class.”

Claire: Right?

Rebecca: Yes, maybe I should update my syllabus. [LAUGHTER] Re-writing the assignment in my head as we’re talking. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Yeah, it’s one of my favorites, and they get really detailed with them. And they have all these mapping tools you can use like Popplet, or Buble.us, or whatever the newest programs are and they make just beautiful illustrations, and get really complicated maps, and do have very clear content sources that they can seek out in the future. And I think that’s great. And I love seeing the people that they choose. It’s really fun to see.

Rebecca: I imagine anything that doesn’t say “just Google it” sounds great. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Yeah, although sometimes Google does pop up on one of the resources in the nodes. They do mention Google and that’s fair, right?

Rebecca: As long as it’s not the only node. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: No, it’s not. It’s never the only one. So I’m teaching this college teaching course, and I had them do a PLE for this course and they have all kinds of people who were out there talking about teaching. They have all kinds of books that we’ve discussed in class and journals that focus on college teaching, conferences that are related to college teaching. It’s really elaborate and intricate. I never really specify, you could specify how many nodes and ties they have to do, but I never do and they have not yet disappointed. They’re always really very thoughtful and well done, and really nicely mapped out resources.

Rebecca: I’m sure as the instructor that gets to look at all of them your own really expands. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: It does, right, right? Yeah, that’s a good point. They have great suggestions. They really do.

John: I really liked the way you described bringing students into the discussion though, by thinking about how it applies to their life and building the relevance and salience of the material, and then preparing them at the end to become lifelong learners. So you’re really bringing students into the conversation in the discipline in a way that a lot of classes don’t.

Claire: Right, yeah. I think it’s really important, and so I’m teaching this course that I’ve mentioned a couple of times now, online this semester. And students are really great and really open, and there are a few things that I’m doing there that I think are interesting. One of the things that I do is, instead of having them submit assignments, they submit everything through the discussion board, and so they all see each other’s PLEs, they all see each other’s digital stories. It’s sort of like a gallery approach to assignments and I love it, you know? And nobody’s complained about it yet. So I think that’s good. I will say I’m teaching graduate students, I might have a different approach if I were doing undergrad. But at the graduate level, they seem very willing to share their information with each other. And they always say that they learn from looking at each other’s posts, that they always think of things that they would not have thought about if they had just been submitting online. And so I do think it’s very important to have the conversation, and the students involved in the direction. Another thing I think is interesting is that I do a questions and comments section on each module. And that’s all it says, if you have any questions or comments, post. They have no reason to post there, and the first time I tried that I thought, “No one’s ever going to use this,” but they do. They get in there and they post, they post thoughts about readings, they post questions to each other, they respond to each other’s questions. And I don’t get very involved in that unless there’s a question that hasn’t been answered, then I’ll answer it. But mostly, that’s a self sustaining thing where students are just self managing the board and helping each other out and talking to each other without the instructor telling them to, and without a lot of monitoring, so that’s fun. So yeah, students are fabulous. I love involving them. I love hearing from them, and I love giving them a space where they can share and talk to each other.

John: And it sounds like they’re quite engaged.

Claire: They are, they’re great, they’re great.

John: The use of a discussion board for students submitting assignments reminds me of an earlier discussion we had on a podcast with Darina Slattery. She called the activity E-tivities, where all the work in her course… it was also, I believe, a graduate course in education…, was done through discussion board submissions. And she also described some of the benefits that students receive from sharing each other’s work and that collaborative environment. So it seems like a really good technique that I should try too. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Right, It’s fabulous. I love it, I love it. I recently was revising my course with an instructional designer. He was like, “You know you’ve got all your assignments set up as discussion boards, right?” It’s like, “Yeah, yeah I know.” He’s like, “Do you think they’re going to be nervous about that?” I said, “Well, they don’t seem to be.” [LAUGHTER] They seem to be fine, just sharing away no one’s, like I said, ever really expressed discomfort either during the class, or through the SOI, it has only ever been very positive. I loved seeing what other people were doing, I learned from other people, it was great to be in that kind of dialogue with other people. And so it is an unusual approach, and I guess maybe it’s good to prepare people for it. But they seem to respond well, at least as far as I can tell.

John: But it’s also preparing people who are going to be teaching to work in an environment that’s collaborative so they’re not in their silos making the same mistakes that tens of thousands of people have made in the past, and being able to learn from each other and to share with each other. So, that seems like a really productive strategy.

Claire: It is a great strategy, at least for me and my students. I’m not saying it works in everybody’s class or for everybodys’ students, but it has been wonderful for me. The other thing I do in this course is that each week they create an assignment that’s called “create.” They have to create something, and it’s something for a final teaching dossier that they do. And so each week they produce something, like they might do a teaching philosophy, or they might outline a class session, or they might do something else. And one thing I’ve done this semester is ask them to offer each other improvements, right? Give everybody a constructive criticism. One compliment, one suggestion for making it even a tiny little bit better, because they then assemble all this work into a final portfolio. And so they’re helping each other out throughout the semester. I’m starting to see their portfolios come in, and it does make them stronger. They are doing really great work. They are all very constructive. They’re very kind to each other, and I had to nudge them a little bit at first and say, “No, you need to help them get it better, It will help their final grades if you can help them now.” And once they understood that they really locked into that and really started trying to help each other on their final projects, and that’s been really interesting and good to see as well.

Rebecca: I’ve been able to do something similar in using chat software. So right now I’m using Google Chat. But I’ve also used Slack to submit and share work.

Claire: Mmhmm.

Rebecca: And I find that my students are much more comfortable sharing in that environment where they can have written feedback and share written feedback, because they can contemplate what they say more carefully. And also, it makes a record of it, and they don’t lose it if we have a conversation about it. It’s like documented feedback. [LAUGHTER]

Claire: Yeah!

Rebecca: …or they can go back and reference, and those are things that students have said that they appreciate about an environment like that is that they’re nervous about speaking up about it, but they’re less nervous if they can plan a little bit more about how they approach it or talk about it in these chat environments. Which is funny because I think of chat as something being like, quick, [LAUGHTER] but they treat it more like a discussion board.

Claire: Right, right. Well, I’m doing it on the discussion board so I think it’s similar to what you’re doing. They do seem to appreciate it, they really do. And I think they’ve benefited from it, and I think through the process of offering constructive feedback, they see things they can improve in their own writing as well. So they’re helping somebody else out, and they’re helping themselves out, and I think that’s really fabulous, and it’s so exciting seeing their final projects come in, and how they have taken them and improved them over the semester. It’s really gratifying.

John: I’m having students do something similar, where they’re providing feedback on each other’s work. And in our last class meeting, one of the students said, “I wish the comments contained more constructive criticism.” And hearing it from another student, I think, has helped quite a bit in improving the quality of the feedback, because I asked them to provide constructive feedback to each other, but they were very reluctant to do that in the first round or two. But when other students are saying, “You know, I wish we could get more of this type of feedback.” They picked an example of that, and it seems to be making a difference.

Claire: Yeah, absolutely. It’s so gratifying. You’re just like, “Yeah, y’all are doing it, this is great.”

Rebecca: Along those lines, John, today in my class, we did an electronic whiteboard activity. I teach web design so we were critiquing a website. So I gave them a link to look at, and then to use sticky notes essentially to provide feedback. And then what I did was ask them, “Was this actionable feedback?” And then they were like, “No, not really. I don’t know what this means, I don’t know what this means.” It’s like, “Exactly,” [LAUGHTER] and I heard all kinds of clicks go on. So I think moving forward, as we moved on in the class period today, it was amazing how much better and more clear [LAUGHTER] the comments were, once they realized how vague they were when we took this thing that was outside of us to look at.

Claire: That’s great.

John: So now this book, Engaged Teaching, was written during a period of pandemic. And also I believe there’s been some developments on the K. Patricia Cross Academy during this period. Did the pandemic influence the development of these two projects?

Claire: That’s a great question, John. I think the answer is most certainly, yes. And on the Cross Academy side, I think it’s a very clear connection. We knew that we wanted to develop videos on how to do them online, eventually. So we had our 50 techniques, and we thought, “Yeah, you know what would be really good, and helpful and useful, is if we eventually, down the road sometime, created short videos on… here’s how you would do this online, either asynchronous or synchronous.” And we were kind of going along our merry way and the pandemic hit, and we realized that needed to happen a lot faster than we had originally planned. And so we sort of front loaded that, and got videos out really, really quickly, all things considered. And it was challenging because we do our filming in California, and we couldn’t travel. So there was no going there to do videos, we couldn’t be in a room with a bunch of other people trying to film those videos because, at that time, at least originally, we weren’t real sure how the spread was happening. And we didn’t know a lot about how to contain it, and I don’t think it would be great to be mask on those videos anyway. So we went to voiceovers and did a lot of work through voiceovers and accompanying footage through that, and so that shifted as well. I think as far as the book goes, I think it shifted our focus just a little bit to that concept engagement a little bit more, because we started to realize how important engagement is for faculty, for the life of faculty, for successful teaching, for all of those things. I think maybe initially it started out as the foundational textbook, and then I think we realized the importance of weaving the engagement piece through that, and thinking through, what does it mean to be an engaged teacher? And how do we engage in this work at any time, right? Especially when we’re struggling and we’re tired, and we’re doing things we don’t know how to do. I think that just became a lot more prominent. It was always there, but I think, like the online videos, the plans were there, they got frontlined. With the engagement, it was always there, but it got spotlighted or forefronted and a lot more

John: Is there some type of foundation funding the development of the K. Patricia Cross Academy? Or where does the funding and support for this come from?

Claire: So the funding for the Cross Academy has been 100% private donations, and anonymous donations to this point. So it has been completely funded by the generosity of people who wanted to support this work, to make this project an open project, and not a paid subscription or anything like that. We wanted it to be open and we found people who thought this was a good idea and were willing to support us from that. We could always use more funding, right? And so in part, this book can help with that because all the royalties that we receive from the book are going directly to support the K. Patricia Cross Academy. We’re supported by the SocialGood Foundation, and all proceeds are going directly to the SocialGood Foundation. The SocialGood Foundation is earmarking them for the K. Patricia Cross Academy, and so all of the money will go directly to support the Cross Academy for helping us continue to develop content, blogs, and videos, and continue sharing that information.

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

Claire: Yeah, that’s a great question. And there is always something next at the Cross Academy. We are continually trying to develop that site, and what is in the works right now is a new phase where we are developing an activity bank for college faculty to work through. And these activities will help faculty reflect on their own current views on the different aspects of college teaching in the book that we’ve just published, discuss their ideas with other faculty, and create teaching materials that can help them in their own classrooms, and also develop products that could help them in promotion, and tenure and merit reviews. So that is coming I hope soon. I guess it’ll be 2023, but that is the next phase that we are working on.

Rebecca: That sounds awesome.

John: It does.

Claire: We’re really excited about it. I hope it’s going to be useful for people and really give them the opportunity to engage with engaged teaching a little bit more, to engage with the Cross Academy in ways that can help them improve their teaching… and students’ learning by extension.

John: Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you, and you’ve given us a lot to think about and our listeners a lot to think about. And we strongly encourage people to pick up a copy of Engaged Teaching. It’s a great book. I haven’t read through all of it, but I’ve read through a big chunk of it in the last few days since my copy came in.

Claire: Well, thank you, and thanks, John and Rebecca for having me. I have totally enjoyed being here, thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. It’s been lovely.

Rebecca: And we look forward to seeing the next round of materials that come out because I know we’ll want to share them.

Claire: Great. Thanks 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.

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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216. Fall 2021 Reflections

Since we started this podcast four years ago in November 2017, we’ve taken a break from our usual interview format at the end of each fall semester to reflect on the evolution of our own teaching practices. In this episode, we look back on our experiences in the fall 2021 semester.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Since we started this podcast four years ago in November 2017, we’ve taken a break from our usual interview format at the end of each fall semester to reflect on the evolution of our own teaching practices. In this episode, we look back on our experiences in the fall 2021 semester.

[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: Hey, John, it’s been a while. [LAUGHTER]

John: It has been, we’ve had a few guest hosts filling in. With your new position you’ve been kind of busy recently.

Rebecca: Yeah, I still have a bit of a teaching load as well as my shift to being in the Division of Graduate Studies. Hopefully things will start smoothing out over the next few weeks.

John: Our teas today are…

Rebecca: I have English afternoon tea.

John: Excellent. That’s a return to an old favorite.

Rebecca: It is.

John: And I have, on a snowy, cold day here in Oswego, spring cherry green tea, bringing me back to a warmer time.

Rebecca: A time that we all wish for. [LAUGHTER]

John: And because we still have this big pile of tea left around in our conference room, because we haven’t been doing too many workshops in person this year.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.

John: So we thought today would be a good opportunity to reflect back on pandemic teaching part 3, 4, 5, whatever it is.

Rebecca: Yeah, we’ve lost count, I think.

John: 20 years or so of pandemic teaching, and what our experiences have been like this semester.

Rebecca: So maybe we should first start off by just indicating the kinds of classes and modalities we were teaching in. So I was teaching two sections of my web media classes, which are stacked classes, so 300-, 400-, and 500- level web design courses, and I was teaching entirely synchronously online.

John: And I returned to a classroom with the smallest large class I’ve ever had here, with about 186 students, as well as an asynchronous class, which I’ve been doing for a number of years. They’re both introductory economics courses.

Rebecca: I know one of the things that I have been experiencing, I’ve heard a lot of other faculty talking about, and that we’ve seen through polls of our students, is the mental health challenges that they’re facing. I’ve had many students report extreme depression, anxiety, heightened stress, complete focus issues. We were just talking this week about memory issues. And it’s really taking a toll on their learning.

John: The good news is that students are much more willing to discuss mental health issues than they have ever been in the past. The bad news is they’re just so incredibly prevalent. I’ve heard from dozens of students who’ve been reporting their experiences with depression, or anxiety or stress, as well as, as you said, difficulties in focusing and just problems with being motivated to do their work.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that motivation issue is an important one to underscore. It’s not even necessarily that they’re not interested in the subject matter, because when they’re in class, they might be fully engaged. It’s what’s happening, or maybe what’s not happening outside of class, that I think is really the challenge that students are facing.

John: I think administrators throughout the country were very optimistic about a return to normalcy this fall. And I think we all were hoping for something closer to a normal experience, our students as well as us. When we had the vaccine come out, that looked remarkably effective and we were assuming that everyone would very rapidly be vaccinated and this whole pandemic thing would be completely under control. And that’s not quite the experience that our students ended up with. And it’s not quite the experience we ended up with.

Rebecca: I think, even if we take the emergency remote learning out of the equation, spring of 2020, and we just look at where we’ve been over the last three semesters. I moved to teaching synchronously online. I’ve taught the same way with the same classes for three semesters, and I’ve really seen a shift between fall of 2020, and fall of 2021. In fall of 2020, although students were kind of bummed out that they might not be getting the same college experience that they had hoped for, they were still in fairly good spirits. I definitely had some extra students struggling that I may not have had previously. But they were engaged. They asked for things like more practice assignments so that they could dig in. And a lot of them were taking advantage of the creative nature of the kind of studio classes that I teach to just escape all the things that were causing stress around them. And I’m really experiencing perhaps the exact opposite this semester [LAUGHTER], where all the things that the students requested and needed and wanted in fall 2020 are not the things that the students need in fall of 2021 and now moving into spring of 2022. How about you, John?

John: My experience in my asynchronous online class was in fact, more of a return to normalcy. Because last year’s asynchronous online class was one where a lot of students expected more synchronous components, which in a few decades of teaching online had never been a common request. And a lot of students were really not that happy about an asynchronous course last year, they were expecting more of a synchronous experience. And now that we have so many more face-to-face classes, including the one I’m teaching, the people who are taking this are mostly adults, they’re mostly working. Many of them are parents and they’re very much back to the normal sort of experience of an online class. My face-to-face students, though, are not doing quite as well. They’re younger in general, and they’re experiencing many of the problems that you’ve described. And they’re having a lot of trouble just completing even simple weekly tasks. And I’ve been providing a lot more structure, I’ve been sending them a lot more reminders with emails, with announcements in class, sending reminders to individual students, and it’s not getting through. There’s a remarkable amount of work that’s just not being done. Even things that would only take 10 or 15 minutes are just simply not being done. And it’s really frustrating to see students struggling and not doing the basic work that they need to to be successful in the course.

Rebecca: I know you teach a lot more first-year students than I do, I teach mostly upper-division students in the classes that I teach. And it’s interesting, because they may be students that I’ve had before who have a track record at that college and have done quite well in the past and have hit an all-time low. It’s like the grind is over. [LAUGHTER] There’s no more grind left to kind of move through this pandemic in a way that they need to if they want to have the academic achievements that they’ve had in the past. It’s interesting that you say that these what we maybe classify traditionally as “non-traditional” students in your online class, are quote-unquote, “back to normal” ish. In part because maybe people who are parents, their kids are back to school, and they’re back to work in a way that maybe feels a lot more normal to them. But school still feels really different for students that are more of a traditional college age.

John: Many of the students in the asynchronous class are part time, they’re taking a couple of classes at a time. But even there, I should note that they are reporting stress at higher levels than I’ve seen in the past. But they’re doing the work, and they’re being very successful. But a lot of that, I think, is age because many of them have been in college at various times for the last few decades, or in some cases for several decades, or have returned to school after being out working for a while, and they’re very well motivated to be successful. And they have a very specific goal they’re often working towards… a very specific career goal… and they see the course as being essential towards meeting that. Our freshmen, though, have been through some pretty rough learning experiences. The quality of the education they received in high school was quite often not very good, but it certainly was very mixed in quality. And there’s a lot of research about some of the learning losses that people experienced with remote instruction. And when you’re 18 years old, and you’re entering college, and you spent a year and a half or so with a pandemic, that’s a non-trivial portion of your life, in terms of pandemic learning. And I think people need to get used to learning how to be in the classroom. And it’s been a challenge for many.

Rebecca: You know, I haven’t been physically in the classroom, but I’ve certainly heard stories of folks who are face-to-face and have students just saying that they don’t even know how to interact with other humans [LAUGHTER], and actually just coming right out and saying that. Can you talk a little bit about what it’s been like to be in person and some of the challenges that you and your students have faced in that environment?

John: One thing I think everyone was hoping was that masking requirements might be gone if the pandemic had been under more control. I’m in a classroom that seats 420 students, but I have 185 students in the class and they’re spread out. There’s often a lot of distance between those students, and they’re wearing masks. And they are participating so much less in class discussions. And when they do, because they’re wearing masks, it’s really hard for anyone to hear them. And that is really frustrating for them, and it’s somewhat frustrating for me too. And it’s been a bit of a challenge. And the mask requirements in theory would be really good, but one of the things I’ve been observing is that some students, at least, have been very reluctant to actually wear their masks over their mouth and their nose. And I’ve had a few students who’ve had to be reminded of that every single class day from the start of the semester. And that is a sort of environment that’s just a whole lot less pleasant. They’re not very happy because they’re being told to wear a mask, and they don’t believe there’s any need to do that. And I’m not very happy because I picked up COVID, most likely from this class earlier this semester. And I’d rather not see it spread any further. But it’s certainly a much less engaged classroom environment than I’ve ever seen in the past. Because students are spread out more, they’re not talking to each other, it’s harder to hear each other. And there’s just not the same level of interaction that I’m used to seeing in that class.

Rebecca: I’ve had some students talk to me about their in-person classes and just the anxiety that they feel and the fear that they feel of potentially being exposed to COVID-19, and that it just really makes them quite anxious to just be around people. And when people aren’t abiding by the policies set, that just heightens the anxiety but also really makes it not safe for particular groups of people, students who might have compromised immune systems and things like this. And so for some students, they were really, really, really looking forward to being back in the classroom but are saying, “Hmm, what online classes are available in the spring so I can stay away from people?” [LAUGHTER] …which is interesting. That’s definitely not the experience of all students, but definitely a subset of students.

John: Our institution, along with the rest of the State University of New York, had a vaccine requirement go into effect at the end of September. And in the first month, there were a lot of students in my class who either had contracted the virus and had to miss class for 10 days or so, or they were in close contact with someone and went in quarantine. So the class began with often a dozen or two dozen people in the class who were not able to attend in person. So I was running the session in Zoom, which is not something I was hoping would have to happen. Because as everyone noted last year, having a class where you have some students in Zoom, and some people in person, it’s just much harder to do. There’s just a much higher cognitive load. I got more proficient at it as this semester progressed, but I certainly would prefer never to have to do that again. And as you said, more and more students were getting nervous about this, and the number of people attending remotely has been increasing, particularly in the last few weeks as people were reporting they were more and more nervous and were staying away to avoid the risk of getting an infection.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we’ve been experiencing, at least on our campus, is certainly there are some cases of COVID-19, but there’s also a lot of cases of other things going on. [LAUGHTER] There’s mono, there’s illness, there’s stomach bugs, but all these things initially may present themselves as seeming like they’re COVID-19 at first, and then many students are sick. And I think, culturally, there’s much more of an expectation to stay away if you’re not feeling well. Which is a good thing, right? That’s a good public health thing, to not make everyone else around you sick. But that does impact what’s happening in classes and who’s in class and who’s present and who’s able to keep up. And so I don’t think that’s going to change, we’re going to need to start responding and thinking about, “What does that mean when students aren’t able to be present in class? Or they’re really too ill to even attend synchronously online or whatever.” So Zoom isn’t always an option if someone’s actually sick.

John: What other adjustments have you made in your classes, given these circumstances? Or what adjustments are you planning to take forward into the spring?

Rebecca: I’ve been taking some mental notes and having conversations with my students about, really, the barriers that they’re facing in success, like what’s keeping them from succeeding in the way that they hope. And I had moved into having more low-stakes assignments that were structured and scaffolded, really in response to some of the things that students had wanted prior to the pandemic. And then also, really, in that first fall semester when I was first teaching synchronously online. And the students now are like, “Whoa, there are too many things to keep track of!” Even though it’s structured, having to do more than a couple of activities in a week just seems completely overwhelming. Because they’re reporting memory issues and other things that are likely side effects of the mental health struggles that they’re facing. I’m finding that they’re pretty engaged during class, and I want to seize the moment on that, and continue doing some really engaging activities. I’ve ramped up community-building activities in every class period. I’ve even had them submit ideas and have implemented them, and they get so excited when I’m using one of their ideas. And switching some things around, I had some review assignments that were Google Quizzes, then I did a Kahoot!. And all of a sudden, somehow, even though it’s practically the same thing, that’s way more amazing. So I’ll likely shift more of those over to Kahoot!. And I’m also thinking of, instead of doing low-stakes assignments, I may just do no-stakes assignments. Those are the things that we’re working on in class, it gives them the opportunity to do things. I’ll probably reduce how many of those we’re doing, because the students are just not able to get through as much as they had in the past. Their capacity of being able to do that has been lessened, as it is for all of us. Things are taking longer amounts of time to do things. So I’m trying to respond to that and really think through ways of structuring the class so that there’s options, too. So one of the things that I did just recently, like literally last week, I was noticing there was a lot of assignments still missing. And for some students that might mean 15 or 20 things. And even though they’re small things, that’s a lot of things. And then that almost paralyzes a student from moving forward. They’re not able to move forward, they just don’t know what to do. They freeze and they’re unable to move forward. So I offered the option of doing a small project instead that would demonstrate the things that those assignments were meant to do, as an alternative. And so some students have responded that that seems way more manageable because it’s one thing even though it has a checklist of things that they would need to do in it. It’s a little more creative, it’s an alternative option. And I think I may just start with having an alternative option from the beginning [LAUGHTER] next semester so that they just have a couple of different pathways that they can choose. Group work is also at an all-time struggle this semester. Although if you’re doing collaborative work, there’s always a team or two where things need micromanagement, you need interventions. That always happens as students are learning to work together in how to be a teammate and how to be a collaborator, but it’s at an all-time high this semester. And so I’m thinking of ways that we can still do collaboration, but in a way that really doesn’t depend on another person to follow through on something, especially follow through on something outside of class. So it’s a major rethink of a couple of things that I do in my classes. But I think it’s necessary in order to respond to the moment and really, where students are right now. How about you, John?

John: Well, I had shifted some last year and more this year to more low-stakes assignments, including some short videos I created with embedded questions. And the main issue is many of the students are just not doing those. I’m using a Lumen Learning Waymaker package, which is a personalized learning system, which is very well designed. We actually talked to the primary author of that, Steve Greenlaw, on an earlier podcast, and one of the basic things that students have to do is just read some text with embedded questions, and they get a small amount of credit just for completing those questions. And that should be the first thing that they do each week, but it’s often the last thing that they do. So reading the basic readings before coming to class is something that probably a majority of students just are not doing. And in the past, I got a much larger proportion of the students doing that. Because when they’re in class, we work on problem sets. I do a lot of work with iClicker where I give them problems, and they work either individually or in small groups on those and half to three quarters of them, depending on the day, are coming in without the basic concepts that they need to have understood to be able to participate in that flipped environment. So it’s been a challenge. And I talk to them about that every day, and it just hasn’t been making a difference. And I’m not sure what to do about that in the future. The next time I’ll be teaching this class will be in fall 2022. And I’m hoping we’re in a better environment and we get back to more normalcy. For my spring classes, I’m teaching very different classes, and I had revised those quite a bit last year. And I think I’m going to move more in the direction of more group work on all of those classes than I had used in the past.

Rebecca: I know flexibility is something that I have continued to try to embrace more and more for students. And this semester, it’s meant accepting more late assignments or just not really paying attention to when things are submitted. And although in some ways it’s good for students, in other ways it’s not. In some ways, if they’re not completing things by a particular time, then it’s not helping them build the skills either. So I’m trying to find ways to be flexible in a way that gets them excited about what they’re doing so that they become really interested in what it is so that they want to do it, and that they want to get lost in it outside of class. And sometimes smaller assignments, or smaller homeworks and things, are harder to get invested in in that way. And given that I’m in a creative field, I have this opportunity to perhaps seize the desire to find that space, but also recognize that some students may find it very difficult to be creative in a time like this, and offering different pathways for those students where that’s not a good option for them. So I’m going to really need to find a couple of different pathways for the information. And what I’ve really been reflecting on and thinking about is, “Well, what are these course objectives? What are they meant to achieve, and can they demonstrate that at the end of the semester?” I’m really moving in this ungrading direction for sure, I can feel it. I’m easing in slowly, not all the way there yet. But I think that’s definitely the framework that I’m thinking through and wanting to embrace because I want the learning to happen. And I don’t really care how it is that they’re demonstrating it to me, other than they can demonstrate it to me. So I just need to figure out a structure that will work for all of us moving forward.

John: In my asynchronous class, I’ve been doing a lot more work with student reflection. And with making connections where, in weekly discussions, for example, I often used to give them some readings and ask them to analyze the readings and discuss it using the terms and concepts that they had just learned. And I’m leaving those discussions much more open-ended, where I’m asking them to make connections to things that they’ve read or stories in the news. And that’s been much more productive in that class. The other thing that’s worked really well in my asynchronous class again, which has been working much better in general is, again, doing a podcast project and the connections that they form when they work on it together is just coming through as a really positive experience where they do get to engage with each other in ways that they don’t always get to do when they’re taking an online asynchronous class. But it’s a lot harder to scale that when you’ve got a couple hundred students.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that the scaling of things is what becomes a challenge. Even scaling flexibility can be a problem in a relatively small class, in comparison to the classes that you’re teaching. Allowing fluid deadlines and then everybody waits until the last minute to do something, means you might get hundreds of things all at once. So you have to really think through what’s also going to work for you as a faculty member as we’re making some of these decisions about how to adjust. But I think the key thing to underscore here is that we can’t just keep doing the same thing, because our students are in a different space than they were before. And they’re coming with different backgrounds. We need to respond to the moment which may mean things that we have traditionally relied on are not working, and that we need to come up with new things.

John: And I think we’ve all seen that to some extent, that ways in which we have taught in the past just are not working that well. And I think most of us are experimenting with new things. But, it’s a challenge.

Rebecca: Yeah. I do like what you were saying, John, about reflection. And I’ve also been doing more of that in my classes, too. And I’m finding that really valuable on many levels. It’s a really great way to connect with students when they’re sharing their own experiences, and the ability to even just make one comment on one thing that they say, I think, connects us a little bit. And they feel more willing to be open and have real conversations about what it is that they’re working on, instead of an artificial or transactional relationship. So, it’s meaningful, and it’s also helping me see where they really are getting stuck, or how they have misconceptions, or the way they see themselves as makers in the world. These are design classes so it’s also, how are they seeing themselves? And I think it is helping to move in that direction. It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I kind of seized the moment of the pandemic to move more in that direction. And I’m really glad that I have and I think that’s one thing that is working particularly well, as you also noted.

John: And another thing I’ve tried this semester is building in more growth-mindset messaging. It’s not working quite as well as I’d like, because people are faced with a lot of challenges. And all those struggles make it a little harder, perhaps, for them to see that sort of growth taking place. But it has inspired a few students to not give up, to stop by and talk about ways in which they can improve. And I keep hoping that by continuing that messaging, even if it doesn’t work for everyone right now, it may help them in the future.

Rebecca: I’ve also been really uplifted by some of the observations I’ve made of students. Bringing students along, really accepting the fact that other folks are struggling for a wide variety of issues and really approaching each other with a very non-judgmental approach, and just meeting their colleagues where they’re at. So they’re working collaboratively with someone who’s seemingly very unprepared and they just say, “Okay, let’s get you through this,” or, “Here’s a thing you can do, how about you do this thing so that you have a way of contributing?” And I’ve witnessed it in many different occasions this semester, and it does restore my faith in humanity.

John: I’ve seen the same with the podcast project, where there were groups where one of the people were not participating at all, and they’d submit their draft. And then a day or two later, they’d submit a different draft with someone else integrated into it. It may have been after the deadline, but I’ve been more flexible on those deadlines. And the people would show up, and they’d go back and redo it, integrating them into it. And I’ve been really pleased with how well they’ve all worked together, especially where they’ve been recognizing the challenges that other students are facing.

Rebecca: Of course, that’s not to say that some students aren’t frustrated.

John: The frustration has come through, but it always ended up with them not abandoning their fellow students, but ultimately supporting them.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think when students have been nudged in that direction, like it’s a collaborative assignment, you have to collaborate, they’re definitely pulling through and figuring it out, and having tough conversations. I’ve been using a thing called a “retrospective.” I’ve mentioned it before, at the end of a part of a project that asks students to think about what their team can start to do, stop doing, and continue doing, and using that as a way to facilitate a difficult conversation about a relationship that’s not working. And I think that that tool has been helpful to provide some structure around that and to deal with it. I’ve also noticed that when collaboration is optional, then they’re just kind of opting out. And I haven’t overly pushed it and accepting the fact that maybe there’s moments where we need to not be collaborative or we really don’t want to be and that’s okay, too… and so, leaving space for both activities to happen. But it’s exhausting, huh?

John: It certainly is. I feel like I’m not working as hard as I was last year, but I’m more exhausted than I was last year. And I’m not quite sure why there’s that perspective, but it’s one I know I’ve been feeling, and I think many people have been feeling.

Rebecca: I know I read a New York Times article, I think it’s a couple weeks ago now, about languishing. The feeling that we’re having that’s just kind of numb is called languishing. And I shared it with my students, and they responded like, “Yes, I understand this thing.” But I think we’re all experiencing the emotions and mental health challenges of the people around us, and that’s weighing on us. It becomes an emotional labor that we’re not thinking about or not realizing that’s eating up our time, it’s eating up our energy. It’s necessary work I think right now to support our students, but it’s also incredibly tiring in a way that maybe a more traditional non-pandemic semester doesn’t have. So naps? Time for naps.

John: In theory, that would be great.

Rebecca: Yeah, neither one of us are nappers for sure. [LAUGHTER]

John: Yeah. So what’s next for you, Rebecca?

Rebecca: Well, I’m looking forward to rolling a little bit more into my role in graduate studies, and maybe bringing more graduate studies topics to the podcast occasionally, but also finding a little bit more balance in my time. We’re talking a little bit about how exhausting this semester is, and I’ve gotten away from some of the things that bring me a lot of joy, like taking walks and reading and writing. And that’s in part just because I’ve moved to survival mode at the end of the semester. I was really good at preserving all of those things at the beginning of the semester and that was really helpful, and then it just started falling apart. And I know that many other faculty probably can relate to that. So I’m looking forward to being able to, after the semester, trying to rebuild some of those things back into my schedule, and getting to do a little more deeper thinking about things that I just haven’t had the capacity to do during the semester. How about you, John?

John: Well, in terms of providing more balance, one of the things that I really enjoyed this fall, for the first time in quite a while, was I had started playing some music with a band this summer and we did a three-hour show. That was just a tremendous amount of fun. And I’m hoping I get to do some of that again, moving forward. It was so nice. It was at a location where everyone had to show proof of vaccination, it was outdoors. So I felt pretty comfortable there, pretty safe there, and it was just a really wonderful escape from being cooped up on Zoom all the time.

Rebecca: Yeah. It’s a good reminder to kind of get back to the things that we love to give us the energy to do some of the other things that we need to do. And to provide some of that support that we need to provide for our students when some days it feels like I just can’t do one more thing.

John: And I think many of us have reached that feeling at this stage of the semester.

Rebecca: Well, I’m looking forward to another year of episodes with you, John.

John: I am, too. The podcast has always been one of the bright spots for me each week. It’s been so much fun talking to so many people doing such amazing work.

Rebecca: So let us close by cheerleading all of our listeners on, you can make it to the end of the semester, you can do it! And thank you so much for listening and supporting this work. And I hope that you continue to listen and that if you have suggestions for things that you want to hear about, please let us know.

John: Well, thank you for listening, and we’ll be back next week.

Rebecca: …right on schedule.

[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. Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

[MUSIC]

199. Revisiting Diverse Classrooms

As diversity and inclusion initiatives mature, evaluation and improvement are prioritized. In this episode, Melina Ivanchikova and Matt Ouelett join us to discuss how one such program has evolved. Matt is the Founding Executive Director at Cornell University’s Center for Teaching Innovation. Melina is the Associate Director for inclusive Teaching in the Center. They developed Cornell’s EdX MOOC on Teaching and Learning in the Diverse Classroom.

Shownotes

Transcript

John:
As diversity and inclusion initiatives mature, evaluation and improvement are prioritized. In this episode, we discuss how one such program has evolved.

[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:
Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca:
Our guests today are Melina Ivanchikova and Matt Ouelett. Matt is the Founding Executive Director at Cornell University’s Center for Teaching Innovation. Melina is the Associate Director for inclusive Teaching in the center. Welcome back.

Mathew:
Thank you. Delighted to join you again.

Melina:
It’s great to be here.

John:
It’s good to talk to you again. This is overdue. We had planned to talk to you after we had taken a group of people through the Inclusive Teaching MOOC that we’ll be talking about, and then this pandemic intervened, and we didn’t quite get to that. So I’m glad we’re finally able to schedule this. Our teas today are:

Mathew:
I’m personally not drinking anything right now. But if I was, I’d be drinking something in the family of Earl Grey. I like a black tea.

Melina:
It’s definitely the Earl Grey time of day,.I’m just drinking water, because of the heat.

Rebecca:
90 degree weather.

Melina:
I want to hold up a tea that Matt occasionally brings for us at staff meetings, which is a gift. You put this little bulb into hot water and it opens up slowly into a flower and has this beautiful aroma to it, and everybody delights in it. So it just causes this moment of group joy. But Matt will know what the name of that tea is.

Mathew:
It’s a green tea, I think it’s sometimes referred to as a lotus bloom. So, thank you, Melina, that’s really kind of you to mention that.

Rebecca:
And I have sa easonally inappropriate Christmas tea. [LAUGHTER]

Melina:
That sounds good.

Rebecca:
I was looking for a little spice.

Melina:
Spices are cooling.

John:
I also have a seasonally inappropriate spring cherry green tea.

Mathew:
They both sound delicious.

MELIN: I wish we could be in the same room together.

Rebecca:
and tea testing. [LAUGHTER]

Melina:
Exactly.

Rebecca:
We have all the teas. [LAUGHTER]

John:
In our conference room, we have hundreds of teas. If you’re ever up on campus, we’re happy to share some with you. In an earlier podcast, we talked to you about the Teaching and Learning in the Diverse Classroom MOOC that you were developing at Cornell and were to release shortly. We had agreed to discuss this after we had a cohort of our faculty go through it. But we had a few other things intervene, including a global pandemic, and we’ve actually had three cohorts go through it. And we’d like to talk to you about the MOOC, and, in general, how it’s gone and where it’s going. But because it’s been a while since we’ve talked about this, could you provide a little bit of background on the origin of this MOOC?

Mathew:
in 2017, when the Center for Teaching innovation was first formed, we were trying to discern strategic projects that were of interest to our selves, but also serve the common good sort of attach themselves to initiatives that were campus wide. And Melina and I gained the support of senior academic leaders to do a course for faculty on campus related to teaching inclusively. So initially, the genesis of this idea was a professional faculty development experience on campus. And then the more that we got sort of embedded in the project, it became really clear to us that it could also answer another strong desire that we had, which was to contribute something broader, something that other institutions could take advantage of, as well. So that’s where the genesis of the idea have moved from an on campus resource to something on a platform like EdX. They’ve been great colleagues, and really wonderful to work with. But it galvanized us, I think, to think both more broadly, but also more specifically, and by more broadly, I mean, we were trying to think about what in the US context stands up to an international conversation around social justice, equity and diversity, and what is uniquely American, and also, for u,s what was uniquely Cornell’s context versus what might have resonance more broadly. So the process of putting it together was really driven locally. But our eye was always on trying to deliver something that might be of use to our colleagues more broadly. Melina, does that resonate for you?

Melina:
Yes, I think we were doing our best at the beginning, floating ideas, and pleasantly surprised when we got the confirmation from our senior leadership. They really thought it would be a good way, and a different way to provide an opportunity for people to engage with this kind of a course, either in groups together or asynchronously by oneself to have a private learning experience. But what appealed was an online asynchronous experience, that wasn’t going to be hours and hours. Early on, we had a lot of conversations about how to keep this to four or five weeks, something reasonable, for professional busy people.

Rebecca:
That length was one of the things I really appreciated about it in that it was a really nice concise, but very specific and detailed, all at the same time. So it really felt manageable. I know we had like three cohorts go through on our campus and I was unable to follow along during the first ones but I was following along right when the pandemic hit and found taking the course at that particular moment really poignant.

Mathew:
This was our experience on our campus too. I’ll be just very honest with you and say I felt honor would be served if Melina and I offered the course one time on campus and we had anybody take at it. It’s sort of like we delivered and after that it’s sort of up to the universe to find footing. But we have consistently had really excellent participation on campus. And I’ll let Melina speak more to the facts and figures. But even this spring, we’re literally just now completing a spring version of it on campus. And we’ve had a really lovely distribution between faculty, graduate students and staff… almost a third, a third, a third, again, and the interest doesn’t seem to be diminishing. And so, Rebecca, I can’t wait to hear more from you and John about what your experiences were with your cohorts. Because part of the joy of doing this is hearing back from campuses. Did it help? Did it galvanize and help facilitate some conversations that were context specific? And we really hope that we could provide the general introductory sort of framework, provide some useful resources in terms of exercises, but then really trust the process would unfold at a campus level in the way that it needed to. So that’s not a rhetorical question, I would love to hear more.

Melina:
To be honest, I was really hoping we could turn the conversation there, too. I really wanted to hear how your local learning communities went three is a significant number.

Mathew:
It’s fantastic. Yeah, that’s serious dedication, and a sign of positive response. So we’d love to hear more.

John:
Each time, I think, we had between 30 and 45 people attending, somewhere in that range. They were mostly faculty, but we did have a few administrators. And one thing that was really effective is one of the faculty members, in the third iteration of that, brought in a couple of her students. And that made it much more powerful. Because while the stories that are provided in the MOOC, in the videos from Cornell students and Cornell faculty are very well done and very moving, when a student gets up and talks about their own experiences and the challenges they face, as a local example of that it’s even more powerful. A number of people signed up for it on their own. But most of the people actually met every week, where we provided three or four times to let people come in at times that were convenient. We’d watch most or all of the videos, and then we discuss each of them. Sometimes we didn’t get through all of them, because the discussions went for a long time. Other times, we were able to get through most of them, and then people did the rest of the work on their own outside. But the discussions were really effective. And having people talk about it in person worked really well. And I think it helped ensure that everyone finished the MOOC, or that nearly everyone finished the MOOC. I know we had some people who didn’t do all the written work, but they at least attended most or all the sessions. And for us, at least, I think having the weekly meeting served as a nice commitment device, which tended to help maintain persistence. And it worked really well. And people have been asking about when we’re going to take another cohort through. And we’ll be planning to do that this fall. I think overall it was a tremendous success on campus. And we did have a few administrators attend, but not quite as many as you received. And we did have some staff members too. But it was mostly faculty.

Rebecca:
I think it was a really nice complement to some of the other work that we had already started doing, but just didn’t have the capacity to roll out the equivalent of that course on our own. And so it was really, really helpful to us. We had done a couple of reading groups related to racism previous to that. We have a really robust accessibility program on our campus and have been doing a lot of professional development around disability and accessibility. And so leveling up to inclusive pedagogy is really where we wanted to be going. [LAUGHTER] And this was a really nice structured way for us to get there. So we’ve been really thrilled with how many people have participated. And I think it really informed a lot of the work that folks did over the past year during the pandemic as well, people became really aware of some of the inequities that weren’t as visible previously.

Melina:
Thank you so much for sharing some details. It’s delightful, even just to picture briefly how you chose to facilitate those and the responses. I love the searching for authentic stories from your own campus, with having students present. That seems really exciting. This might be a good time to mention a couple of things. One is that we made the decision in January to move from a instructor-paced model to having it be a self-paced model, which means now that the course is open all year round. And the reason for that was to give campuses and facilitators more flexibility to run the course on the schedule that worked for them, because we kept trying to guess and get it right, but sometimes we’d get right in the middle of the busiest part of the semester, which some people loved but other people… it didn’t work so well for them. So I think that’s a good decision. We started to wonder more about how are people facilitating the course we’re doing and trying to reach out to them and have conversations or looking for a little bit of feedback, even informally, just like this, to see how things were going. So, we heard similar things from a few others like they got inspired to look for the stories that were from their own community, in their own students. And there’s many places to look for stories like that: the student newspapers, conversations with faculty, as you’ve described,

Mathew:
I love your strategy of a faculty member bringing their own students and that there’s no substitute for that. So I love that…that’s a great idea. Can I say too, Melina, this is a little bit of the inside part. But it was a big moment for us to let go of the instructor-led version of the MOOC and partially, we just needed to have a reassurance that we had done a good job, that the quality of the work was substantial enough that it could just sort of go forth. And we were always confident that our colleagues could facilitate it well. I think, John and Rebecca, it’s such a compliment to your on campus facilitation, because we know the number one thing here is not the advertising, it’s word of mouth. And if colleagues are saying to their friends and associates, “Oh, yeah, it wasn’t a terrible thing, you know, it was an okay use of my time” …then we know that’s so much more persuasive than any kind of blitz you could do through email or anything else. And if you’re continuing to get this large group, and that’s a significant proportion of your faculty continuing to find this a good use of their time, then Melina, we can take a deep breath now. We can sort of say, “It’s okay, we let our baby go out into the world, and it’s gonna be okay.”

Melina:
But last year was a very unique year. So we had a giant boost. As soon as the pandemic started, people enrolled in the course. We decided to run the course again, earlier than we had planned in response to the street movement and fighting for racial justice. And we had a giant leap in attendance here at Cornell as a result of that. And then we run another learning community series in October. And then Matt mentioned, we ran one in the spring too. We do have some fun things to report out on in terms of patterns of what people are saying about what they’re learning. We have a pre-post survey that gives us a sense of how people feel at the beginning, and then matches to their experience of how they feel at the end. And so I was surprised by the things that floated to the top. So I can share what the top four things were. The number one thing that they moved the most on… so this was things that they’ve collectively they move the most on… So the first one was, “I’m aware of campus resources to support colleagues and students in sustaining inclusive learning environments.” I don’t know why that one’s surprised me. But I think even though our course is sort of the Cornell example, most college campuses in the US have all sorts of support and offices in place. And so this might have been the place where they finally got to hear the list of all the different offices that support student learning and accessibility. The second one was “I feel prepared to address controversial comments that may arise in class.” But that was one worry that we had initially, was that an asynchronous online course would never take the place of a face-to-face learning experience. This shows me and Matt’s bias also, because we’ve been strongly face-to-face instructors for most of our teaching careers. So we had to learn, ourselves, how to be online instructors, and what that meant… how to have a stronger presence in the course itself. So between our pilot version of the course and the second iteration, we added more videos of ourselves. And so we were very gratified by seeing this number of people feel more competent around this. The other one is “I’m informed about specific strategies for creating more inclusive classrooms.” And the fourth one is “I feel confident I can evaluate my course structure and materials for inclusivity.” So that’s where things are trending very strongly. We’re hoping to publish some findings pretty soon about that. And then the other response that we hear over and over again, is how moving the videos were, which to me is personally gratifying, because from the moment when I was a little girl, my father used to read to me every night before bed and, tried and true, I do the same with my kids. Stories were just my way into learning about the world and continue to be so. So it’s just the thing that moves us, our emotions, it’s the thing that makes us open to caring about systemic change, because the door opens to us through individuals… the stories and experiences of discrimination. When we share in community about our own experiences of discrimination and bias, and even our own mistakes that we’ve made with others. I think that kind of learning is so powerful. And so I think that we were able, through the videos, to lift that experience of storytelling,

John:
The narratives in there are extremely powerful, and people reacted really positively to them.

Rebecca:
…especially because there were such a wide variety of disciplines reflected, which I think is really important and sometimes can be challenging for an individual campus to do a small workshop series or something and get that broad of representation at each little event. You might have representation throughout a whole semester or a whole academic year, but maybe difficult to have that much representation in a single sitting of something

Mathew:
Absolutely. Even like the tried and true method of a panel, It doesn’t really necessarily lend itself for people to really do a deep dive or really share. The other thing that I’ve come to appreciate even more deeply is the power of getting out ahead of a crisis and providing an opportunity for folks to just talk, to grapple with ideas, provide them some frameworks. They may not like Melina and I had this very interesting conversation with one of our colleagues who was going through the reading list saying, “too aggressive,” “not deep enough,” and was just sort of a typical faculty critique of the reading list. I was like, “Super engaged, I love it.” Absolutely. Bring it on. I’m not changing any of the readings, but I loved having that conversation, because I thought, that’s someone who’s really gotten engaged and is trying to figure out how to apply this in the context of her work and her discipline and her students. And for me, that’s the best that it gets. But it is this capacity building or resilience building. So all of your cohorts, all those folks who sat together, that’s a transformative human experience. It sort of harkens back to the sitting around the campfire. They’ve had this moment together that… I don’t know when or how, but I’m positive it will do good. It will do good for the campus. And it will do good for students. And nothing else, like Melina was suggesting, it gives you a small cohort of colleagues to rely on and to say, “I’m not really sure about this, what do you think? What would you do in this situation?” And the other thing that we came to learn, which I have to say, Melina and I were both very slow to want to do anything online. But we also were very suspicious of lurkers. And we were sort of like, “Well, where are these people? They’ve signed up, but they’re here, but they’re not posting anything in the discussion board. But I’ve now come to really embrace lurking as a form of learning. I’m not dismissive of it at all. I think some people want to be in the conversation. They’re taking it in, they’re absorbing it, but they just don’t feel like they have a lot they want to say yet. Or someone else has already said it, or they’re waiting to see what other people have to say. So Melina and I have, a number of times, come back around to this conversation about what does it mean to really be engaged. And I think our growth edge, our learning, has been to really expand that definition of what it means to be engaged. So if you sign up for the course, but you never log in, that’s not engaged, that’s wishful thinking. But if you sign in and you tap through any of the videos, or even look at the resources, like I had to smile when you said your colleague maybe didn’t do all of the writing. Not a problem. What we’re finding is that people will circle back around. Like we’ve had a number of people who’ve taken the course twice. I think that’s a phenomenal commitment on a faculty member’s part, I mean, just given how stretched everybody is for time.

Melina:
Yeah, I have a faculty member who emailed me today saying I can’t wait for next spring, when will offer learning community opportunities again, so that I can take it for the third time. [LAUGHTER] And she was trying to remember where she could find the references to active learning strategies. So I’m like, “those are in Module Three.” “Oh, great.” That’s what she was really looking for. There was a new faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh who contacted me what seems like ages ago, it turns out, it was only last December, but it feels like three years ago, and she wanted to talk about how we made the videos because she wanted to make videos on her own campus. And so that was really inspiring. And she recently reached out again, and I met with her this morning, and she’s gotten all her academic leadership on board, they’re going to make their own asynchronous class, they have a video team in place to make it. This is inspiring, because our action plans are always inspiring. And sometimes a person’s action plan is this is a draft of my syllabus diversity statement, or this is my plan for TAs or graduate students. Sometimes they’re thinking of a plan that will be years down the road, or they’re thinking how to bring in diversified speakers. All of those are strategies that we took all of the action plans that people had submitted locally and made word clouds with them, and the word student is the thing. It just stood out as the most giant thing. And so I thought, wow, this is telling me that student centered learning strategies are the thing that people are walking away with. It was a litmus test, but this person took it over and above. And so I just thought, it’s a ripple effect. It’s her project. And she’ll go on to inspire others. We’ve had people come back and say, “Can you do one for librarians? Can you do one for teaching graduate students? Can you do one for the law profession or medical profession?” She’s making one that’s anchored in the medical profession. So I just celebrated her and said, “I hope you can make it a MOOC and not just for your own campus.” Maybe the same thing will happen to them that happened to us, which is they’ll start small and then dive out.

Rebecca:
It’s amazing how projects sometimes balloon like that.[LAUGHTER] Like, wow, that’s not quite what I had in mind and now I have this giant thing that I’m doing. We’re glad that it happened. I wanted to comment a little bit, Matt, on lurking. As a lurker, I thought I might just confess, like what lurkers do. So I followed along twice, the first time I was an active lurker, in part because I was doing a lot of self reflection, and I didn’t want to communicate with other people while I was processing. I had to have some of that time and space to process for myself and how that related to other diversity, equity and inclusion things that I was engaged in, and so that I could then articulate to other people how that fit in with what I was doing, because I needed that time and space to process. And then the second time, I was an active, engaged participant, but I definitely lurked the first time and it was really to have that self-reflection time.

Mathew:
I’m so glad you did. You have to do that. Otherwise, the tension between making ourselves vulnerable and protecting ourselves can be immobilizing. I’m delighted to hear that. I actually think, Milena, that might be something interesting. We figured out early on that people needed us to normalize posting to a discussion list is not academic writing, just post your thought and let things evolve. And we sort of struggled with that and figured out some language on that. But now I’m wondering… Rebecca, do you think it would be helpful if we posted a little something about the benefit of being a lurker, to just sort of normalize that and say, “This is really emotional, and it’s deep And maybe you just want to slide through and focus on yourself, and that’s perfectly fine.”

Rebecca:
Yeah, maybe we don’t call it lurking. But really, it’s more like a journaling

MATTHEW: Yes.

Rebecca:
Like a self reflection kind of activity. Like I did a lot of the activities a first time just kind of in my notebook and was thinking through things.

Mathew:
See, I think you’ve put your finger on one of the attributes of life in academia and higher ed that stymies this kind of work, which is we leap to action, and we don’t provide enough opportunity for ourselves to just do the kind of internal work we need to to feel some sense of groundedness. What do I think? What have my experiences been? What has worked for me and what am I still working on? …kind of things. And to be quite honest, you would have been my favorite student. If that was what you got in round one, I would have been totally happy, but moving it into the campus or into a discussion with your colleagues. That for me is icing on the cake, because you as a teacher will be transformed by that, where you’ll never approach any of this stuff the same way again.

Melina:
I have a friend who’s an internet scholar, so she actually researches lurking. I read a draft of an article that she wrote where she actually talked about the importance of lurking for learning about different others… like basically, it was making an argument that lurking is a really good way to learn how to be an ally, to learn about groups that you’re not a member of, to learn what new vocabulary is out there, in terms of how to talk about certain topics. I know, there’s a lot of anxiety about offending people and getting the terms right. And I’m at the point now where I’m likely to make mistakes, because things have changed enough within my own lifetime that the vocabulary is constantly really being updated. I think that anything we can do to reduce anxiety and help people feel more connected to each other, to the course, to have opportunities to just reflect on their own experiences. And you’re not the only one who engaged with the course that way, Rebecca. The woman I talked to this morning did the same. She posted, but she would only post at the end of reading every other person’s reflections. And I’ll say, just in case somebody goes to the course and says, “Well, where are the discussion boards?” …that was one of the things that we ended up giving up in moving to the self-paced modality. And that’s because we couldn’t staff moderators 24/7. Before we were able to have a robust and temporary staff in place that would help us moderate the discussion boards. We just know that sometimes there are bad actors who aren’t there for learning. We never had trouble in our discussion boards, they were lovely, so that was such a difficult decision to make. But we revised the guide that we wrote for facilitators to just encourage thinking about and talking about alternative means to supplement those, whether it’s a closed Facebook group or a discussion board in Canvas, or leaving extra time during the face-to-face opportunities. But it sounds like, in your structure, your face-to-face opportunities are giving people plenty of opportunity for discussion.

Rebecca:
Can you talk a little bit about how you facilitated at Cornell?

Melina:
Sure, I’d be delighted to. It’s complicated because it’s not the same every time. So just to give you a sense, I co-facilitated with another staff member from our center, we did a faculty interdisciplinary learning community, same person with addition two other staff, one person from the graduate school. We did the one for graduate students and postdocs together with a slightly different curriculum. I partnered with a faculty member from the school for integrative Plant Sciences and we anchored that one in the department this last time. This is like the story of my life. I used to team teach as a community college professor, but I was the one that had to be the team teacher with everybody. So every year I had two or three new teaching partners for the same course. So I’d be basically begging them to use my course syllabus so that we could have a little bit of sanity for me. So I love this because people have different facilitation styles, they bring different skills to the table. So it’s very inspiring, and they’re very different. So the interdisciplinary faculty cohort is one kind of experience. The faculty there basically love hearing about similarities and differences, like they’re so relieved to find colleagues who care just as much as they do about inclusion. And they’re delighted to hear about strategies that maybe they can try and they’re also relieved to share the knotty points of difficulty that others may not be facing that are discipline specific to them. And then, in the cohorts that we’ve led that are anchored in the department, those conversations are just as rich because you can focus on things that are important to that group. So in the School For Integrative Plant Sciences, we asked the chair to provide a scenario for a difficult conversation so that we could have a little practice around that. And they’re remodeling their entranceway. So they’re having these discussions about how to portray their discipline. And so the argument is about the history of the discipline and all the white male people versus wanting to diversify the discipline nowadays and what they want to do. So we had a pretty amazing sort of hot topics dialogue that I think left them feeling more empowered and more ready. And the person who’s actually truly leading that initiative was also relieved to hear all the different opinions. And it was really important to hear the different perspectives. I don’t know if that completely answers your question. I’m just right, fresh out of doing those. So I kept a journal where I just kept writing down little ideas. Matt and I keep talking about writing a book about this. Like, I want to make sure I write about this and write about that and write about this. So it was a deeply reflective process for me. I keep learning a tremendous amount. And sometimes, to go back to Matt’s earlier comment, we’re not going to change the readings, but sometimes we do go and make updates or add references. we weren’t able to touch on every single identity category. And sometimes people don’t find themselves and they say, “Why didn’t you talk about this or that?” And so then we make an effort to do that. And I have a running list of edits that are ready to be worked on for the next version of the course that gets posted.

Mathew:
If I could tailgate, Melina, there are two points that you made that I just think are so evocative of our approach to this. One is we really wait to see who’s registered and how they fall out. Are there cohorts? Are there natural cohorts that emerge from that, and that was your point, Melina, about it being complicated, and sort of last minute, because we sort of wait to see who’s on board. And then your second point that I just want to reiterate is, it’s organic. And I think we’re both learning both about the DEI issues, but also about teaching and teaching in an online environment. And what does it mean to have a global perspective in a MOOC? This is new to both of us still. And so it’s always really interesting. And we’re trying to still… like Melina has revised the handbook for facilitators every single semester, because we keep getting really good ideas from folks across the spectrum who have tried some things out and said, “This really worked, and this didn’t.” And our goal always is to make it as useful as possible. So it also keeps it really interesting. So it’s the same course. But it’s never the same course, you know that, you’re both deeply embedded in teaching as well.

John:
Yeah, the discussions vary dramatically depending on the specific composition. And when we were meeting three times a week, or four times a week one time, each discussion with a little different depending on who happened to show up that day. And it worked well, though. I appreciated the fact that I got to participate in many of those discussions.

Mathew:
In the ideal world, that’s exactly what it would be, you would sort of have a flipped classroom, you would do the online course. But you would always have a cohort of people to talk through your ideas with and I think that’s, for me, the ideal scenario. And I have to ask, are you assessing this? Obviously, people being there is one key assessment, that’s a huge vote of confidence. So clearly, you’re doing really well. The fact that they come back, that’s even better evidence.

John:
We have not done any formal assessments. We’d like to, but we’re somewhat understaffed. We’d like to assess many more of the things that we’re doing at the teaching center, and certainly the effectiveness of this would be useful. I wish we had a good answer for you on that.

Mathew:
Actually, that’s a really good answer, John, because it’s sort of provoking me to think, together with Melina. We’ve got the protocol that we use, the pre-post, and Melina and our other colleague, Amy Cardace Ardays are working on publishing that protocol. But that might be something that if we can move that process along, that would give you something at the campus level, easy to administer, and really, really interesting. So it’s all self report, of course, but it at least gives you a sense of over time, in general, and an aggregated level, what our faculty finding useful about the experience in terms of their own learning and development. I hadn’t thought of that. Yeah,

Melina:
I did a presentation at the IUPUI conference, and, as a result of that, I have started collaborating with a couple of other institutions who are in particular interested in how to assess their inclusive teaching interventions. And so, in one case, they started by wanting to use our protocol, but embed the protocol in the other part of their plan that they had in place. So we’ll be presenting together as a team this year at IUPUI, which I’m excited about. And I also think that assessing the learning communities is its own sticky wicket. The learning goals are both the same ones that are in the course and you also want to know whether the learning community itself went as well as it could have or what you might do differently because I still have a goal here locally at Cornell to have more of these department level immersions because those are the ones that have been pretty exciting because colleagues suddenly see each other with new eyes, like they see their colleagues as co-agents for change and social justice work instead of having the experience in the interdisciplinary group that I mentioned where they’re like, “Thank goodness, there’s someone over across campus who cares as much as I do.” So part of assessment is being able to tell your story persuasively about what you’re doing and why people should participate.

Mathew:
I think also, part of what assessment can do is reflect on what’s next. What’s the growth edge here? What would help people in the next step and so as Melina said, departments are our big go-to next step. We’re really interested in working with a coherent subset of people we’ll never get an entire department. And we don’t need that. We don’t need unanimity. We just need a core of consensus that this is a worthwhile use of their time. And what Melina hasn’t mentioned, is this other project she’s working on with another colleague of ours that I think is super interesting, which is curriculum mapping through a DEI lens. And so really, when we think about systemic change, in building more multicultural, inclusive institutions, the department is really the unit of analysis. That’s where the work happens. And it’s also where the chief stakeholders stay the longest. And so, Provosts rollover, Chancellors rollover, presidents come and go, but departments mostly stay intact. And so, if they choose to invest in this sort of critical analyses of DEI issues, there’s great possibility for really changing long term the experiences of undergrads and grads and also the people who are part of the department. It goes to recruitment and retention at every level, from undergrads,to grad students to new and junior faculty. So we’ve been sort of building, socializing the course on campus, building a sense that this is a good use of your time globally. And then Melina has… how many departments have you’ve worked with now? Four? Three?

Melina:
We have three on deck for the fall, and had those initial conversations about getting things started and meeting them specifically where they are at in their process. People have expressed different beginning points or interests for where they want to get started. But this is what my colleague Kathleen Landy, who is really helping us to visualize difficult concepts in a very simple way. She’s basically created some tools that we can use to lead people through this process. And we’re socializing… it might not be the right word… but we’re basically getting the word out that this is a program and a service that we offer, and having some initial conversations with folks to just let them know what this is and how the resource works. And, so far, the reception has been really positive. And I think there’s just a different set of needs. We sometimes just talk about different entry points, maybe people want to think about curriculum, maybe they really want to think about pedagogy. I met with a group today that really wanted to help getting a discussion started about social identities and implicit bias. And so that’s really about instructor self reflection, and what our lived experiences have been, and then how we translate those into our teaching practices. So, one fantasy that I have is that our portfolio basically runs the gamut around that framework, so that people who want to work on curriculum have a rich tool for curriculum mapping, and then they also get the benefit of the facilitated dialogue and deeper conversations.

Mathew:
Yeah, I’m a big follower of the sort of John Dewey approach, start where the learner wants to start. And in many cases, all roads lead to Rome. It doesn’t really matter where we start if we have a holistic systems perspective.

Rebecca:
… and the desire to start.

Mathew:
Absolutely. [LAUGHTER] That’s the critical piece. Exactly.

Melina:
Which is an important threshold to cross over… the desire to start. People come to us because they want to, as opposed to this is now a university requirement or something like that, because that threshold is so important and meaningful.

John:
I think a lot of campuses have reached that threshold now because the pandemic, as Rebecca had mentioned earlier, has revealed a lot of the inequities and challenges that our students face in ways that were always there, but that faculty may not have been as fully aware of. It’s much harder to ignore some of the challenges our students face when you had to deal with them in class every day, when you can see them struggling with things that would be hidden when they were on campus. Many people are ready for addressing these issues and these challenges.

Mathew:
I couldn’t agree more. I think timing is everything. And our hope is to build a port of entry. That, like Melina mentioned very early on, we do everything we can to bring people’s anxiety down so they can relax and be in a mode that allows the learning to take place. If it’s okay, I’d love to hear from the two of you about what would you like to see in Teaching and Learning in the Diverse Classroom? What would you see as a next step?

Melina:
We were thinking of maybe starting a podcast. [LAUGHTER] Just kidding, just kidding.

John:
We’d be happy to help.

Melina:
We love your podcast.

Mathew:
Yeah.

Rebecca:
That was one of those projects that started small that blew up big as well. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca:
I do have an answer. One of the things that I think that we struggle with… limited resources… and also, the complexity of timing is always a challenge being able to bring people together at a specific time, so we offer things at multiple times. One of the things that we always have trouble measuring or reporting out Is what do people do with this information? And so some of the pre- and post-testing that you were mentioning before, I think, gets at that a little bit. But what’s the reflection that happens a specific period of time afterward, is something that we haven’t done yet. We haven’t engaged. I think we both have this inclination to want to do some of that stuff, but like, not always the capacity to do it. And then also, we’ve tried a couple of things like badges if you want to tell your story. And sometimes it’s hard to collect that information in a way that’s useful, that doesn’t take ages for someone to produce to submit it to us. And then also to like, analyze it. [LAUGHTER]

Mathew:
That’s a great point, we’ve bandied about this idea of sort of a retrospective survey, like a semester out, a year out, two years out, what remains important or salient? or what have you done differently? And we’re still, I think, in discussion. Is that a way to say it, Melina? We haven’t really resolved yet how to do that. And for us, it’s the same issue. It’s bandwidth.

Melina:
I appreciated the fact that Matt was writing down your idea, Rebecca, [LAUGHTER] because sometimes it’s a matter of timing, getting us at the right flow of the creative curve, and also the amount of times that we get the same ask. So if somebody else had asked for more videos that had faculty talking about successful strategies and how to implement them. So we might be able to talk to your point and meet that person’s invitation. And the other requests that we’ve had, which we haven’t had bandwidth for, was to present a wider variety of different types of institutions, especially in module five when we’re talking about institutional change efforts. So that was one idea. We would love to explore these if we had the capacity.

John:
On that issue, though, I do have to say that the people you chose to speak, I think, speak to all institutions. I think some people may have been concerned that this was coming out of Cornell, and we’re four-year public institution. But no one really left with any concerns about that. I think the issues that are addressed are pretty universal. I think that part works really well. One thing though, that I know a number of faculty were looking for is more specific guidance on what techniques could work to make their discussions a little more inclusive in class and what other techniques could be used to help improve the success of students who are struggling. And there’s so many things there that the issue gets really wide. And I think the topics you chose are really good and universal and apply to everyone. But I know a lot of people would like some things specifically, that could help narrow some of the challenges in STEM classes, where the success rates vary very dramatically. And a lot of faculty were raising questions about that, particularly in math and in the sciences, and so forth. There’s a lot that’s already there. There’s just so much you can do in a five-week class. And I think what you have there is wonderful.

Rebecca:
What you’re saying, John, actually makes me think about a need to send a reminder to people that have participated in a cohort about all the resources that were available there, because now you’ve had time and space to reflect, maybe have tried some things in classes, and it might be worth revisiting some of the material again.

Melina:
One thing that I wished we could do, which we just couldn’t quite figure out a way to do this, but in the MOOC, we had people post what their action plans were on the discussion board. So now we’ve lost access to being able to see those, but the ones that we get through our Cornell cohorts are pretty incredible. And the quality of those jumps up significantly when we have a learning community, like the learning community action plans. I think John said this earlier, like it just helps people finish the course and actually get through it just to be part of a learning community. But then also the quality of the action plans, I think because they’re presenting them to each other… our last session in our learning community is them presenting their plan… and then hearing their colleagues questions and feedback. And those have been really impressive. And I like, John, what you’re saying. I think people want to see some examples of this in action. Like sometimes I wish we could get sort of live footage of a classroom where someone’s doing a really great job and have the camera be… people know it’s there, but they can forget about it.

Mathew:
Melina and I’ve talked at length about sort of what’s missing in this experience is the experiential aspect. And there’s a certain component in the dialogue, the discussion that you host or facilitate that helps with that, that’s super helpful. Because even though you may not be having people do psychodrama, or acting out role plays or stuff like that, but just the act of talking through these moments can be enormously helpful. But we’ve been really trying to think about how the next step might be something that’s more experiential, because oftentimes, people just need literally the physicality of a practice, of a walk through. He says this, she says that, what do I do? Then something else gets said, then what do I do to that? And that sort of is part and parcel to building a sense of efficacy, like you don’t need to have all the answers but you do need to have some strategies that you feel are useful in the moment and don’t dig you into a deeper hole. So that’s one of the other things… I don’t have an answer for that yet, but we’ve been thinking.

Rebecca:
Our DEI officer, Rodman King, has ran sessions on our campus that are like that,like little scenarios, and did small groups where people were talking through it and those are some really popular sessions, they always needed more time. People got really engaged and really wanted to talk through the details and really process. So we often didn’t get through more than one or two examples in a session, but it was a incredibly popular sessions when we’ve offered those.

Mathew:
Yeah, I love that idea. And people feel like there’s an expert in the room who can help them. And it’s theoretical, it’s a scenario, so they can risk making a mistake, but the practice is real, that level of physicalities It’s a wonderful idea.

Melina:
Can I circle back to something John said earlier about the people being worried about the Cornelll voices being like too Cornell or something like that? I think that the reason that that doesn’t happen is because people were willing to make themselves vulnerable during the interview process. So they really come across as three dimensional complicated human beings who are willing to tell their stories of struggle and the background. And I actually think that we have a situation at Cornell, where the name of the institution itself basically has almost everybody suffering under some kind of horrible imposter [LAUGHTER] syndrome, which makes us maybe nicer people, I don’t know. But my experience here has been that my colleagues are incredibly kind and welcoming and eager to support their students’ learning… that always is shared among faculty everywhere, but they’re also eager to support each other’s learning in adult spaces. And that has continued to be a delightful point of engagement. I used to teach undergraduates and now all of my work is through our teaching center. And I really far prefer working with adults thinking about social identity in a different way, like maybe they arrived already. Oh, no, wait, there’s new things to learn.

Rebecca:
I think that authenticity really comes through, which is really powerful. And I think you’re right. On camera, everyone feels really authentic. It doesn’t feel scripted. And I think that’s what’s important about it.

Mathew:
I totally agree, Rebecca, I’m really happy to hear that that’s your perception. Obviously, we picked the people. And part of it also was people relish the invitation to be honest, and to tell what their stories are as they are unfolding. And so I think, Melina, this is where you started, the power of the story, but it’s also the power of inviting people to share their story, that indication that “Yeah, we really want to hear it.” And I do want to do a little bit of a shout out for Melina, she was our… I don’t even know what to call her… executive producer. She was our talent manager. And so she did a lovely job of engaging everybody and getting them centered and made sure they had coffee or water, just sort of genuinely set the stage for a real dialogue, much like you and John do in this podcast. You just make it really easy to be present and say what’s on your mind.

Rebecca:
Thanks. Speaking of invitations, we always invite people to tell us what’s going to happen next. So what’s next? [LAUGHTER]

Mathew:
Next is action plans, Melina and I still have to wrap up the class so… which is actually, even though it’s July, it’s our favorite part of the class. We love reading and responding. So we’ve chosen to do the responses to the action plans by brief recorded videos, mostly because it warms up the classroom. And also we start talking about it, and I think our feedback is far more robust. And we read for different things. So it’s always so interesting to me to hear what resonated for Melina and why. And so I’m really looking forward to that. And then, Melina…

Melina:
What’s next… I want to do a deeper dive on the importance of storytelling. So this isn’t next on our MOOC, but just on what we’re thinking of offering next year through our center to support inclusive teaching, but just really enlivening and bringing to bear this idea that storytelling is an inclusive pedagogy, how to do it, when to do it, when it’s appropriate. It goes back to John’s question about how do you facilitate lively discussions? How do you bring in the personal and the individual when you’re wrestling with difficult scholarly ideas? Sometimes we get folks from STEM saying, “Oh, this is Social Sciences, like the humanities and social sciences should deal with this. So making it relevant, making a case for why who we are as people really matters to the way we learn, how we learn, how we feel in the classroom about affect. So we have a few projects related to that new avenue.

John:
And there was also a brief mention of the possibility of a book. Is that something planned in the near term? Or is this a longer time horizon project?

Mathew:
Well, we have an outline. I think…

Rebecca:
…that’s a start.

Mathew:
Yes, it’s a big start. We have the will, and we have the way, we just now need to do the work. But I think we could help people. I think we have some things to say about how campuses can galvanize around teaching and learning inclusively, as a modality for systemic change. People want to, like you were saying earlier, John, there’s a great interest in these issues now. The salience is higher than it’s ever been before. People I think are just not really sure how to get started. And I think that the Teaching and Learning in the Diverse Classroom course tries to break it down and say there are multiple points of entry, any one of which is useful. We could sort of do that at the department level. Teaching in a course is one point of entry but also curriculum mapping and sort of the other things that we do with folks could work as well.

Rebecca:
I love the idea of the ports of entry.

John:
Thank you. It’s great talking to you again. And next time I do hope we can get together and have some tea in person, either on our campus or on yours or at some conference somewhere.

Mathew:
I would love that. And good luck to everybody who’s still teaching. Thank you all so much. It’s a pleasure.

Rebecca:
Thank you.

Melina:
Thank you.

[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]

176. Critical Thinking

“I want my students to think more critically” is a familiar statement in higher education, especially when we mix in conspiracy theories, pseudoscience and fake news. In this episode, Dr. Linda Nilson joins us to discuss practical techniques faculty can use to help students develop the skills necessary to become critical thinkers. Now Director Emeritus, Linda was the founding director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University. She is the author of Infusing Critical Thinking Into Your Course: A Concrete, Practical Guide as well as many other superb books, book chapters, and articles on teaching and learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: “I want my students to think more critically” is a familiar statement in higher education, especially in a social media environment filled with conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and fake news. In this episode, we discuss practical techniques that faculty can use to help students develop the skills necessary to become critical thinkers.

[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: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Dr. Linda Nielson. Now Director Emeritus, Linda was the Founding Director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University. She is the author of Infusing Critical Thinking into your Course: a Concrete, Practical Guide, as well as many other superb books, book chapters and articles on teaching and learning. Welcome back, Linda.

Linda: Thank you very much for having me back, John.

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

Linda: I certainly am. And this is Twinings Berry, multiple berries.

Rebecca: Oh, yum.

Linda: Yeah. It’s delish. And I’m so glad you’ve helped to get me back into tea. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: As everybody should be,

Linda: Yes, yes, yes. It’s a wonderful thing.

John: I had some of the Twinings mixed berries early today. But I’ve got a chocolate mint black tea, which is really good.

Linda: Ooh, chocolate.

Rebecca: Chocolate anytime of day is excellent.

Linda: Yeah, really.

Rebecca: It’s an important food group. [LAUGHTER] Just like tea. I’m drinking that palm court blend that I have recently started making pots of. It’s pretty decent.

Linda: Great.

John: We just saw a note that you have this forthcoming book on critical thinking. What motivated you to write this book, now that everyone has this universal agreement on facts and reasoning and logic…

Linda: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

John: …and we don’t have a lot of disputes on these things anymore? [LAUGHTER}

Linda: Ha hah… Ah, yes. Actually, politics had nothing to do with it, if you can believe that. Originally, I got interested in critical thinking in the 90s. I decided to give a talk on it for some conference. And I got into the literature. And I said, “Okay, as soon as I get this talk over with, I am never, ever, ever going to do anything having to do with critical thinking, again, because the literature, it’s just a siloed mess.” So anyway, I just put that away. Well, then I guess it was something like eight years ago or so, Clemson University, in its infinite wisdom, decided to select critical thinking for its QEP, its Quality Enhancement Plan. And I thought, “Oh, no, do you know what you’re doing? Do you have any idea how difficult this is going to be?” And of course, I figured, like, I’m going to be doing workshops, so I got to get back into this literature. And I realized what I had to do was synthesize it for the faculty, because why should I inflict a literature’s flaws and warts on them. So that’s what I decided to do. Well, then, as it turned out, Clemson wasn’t the only university picking critical thinking for a QEP, and so I started getting invitations to do workshops, so I got on the road, and that’s always fun to do. I was back into it, but trying to make it as practical and as easy to implement for faculty as possible. So that was my goal, is always to make the faculty member’s job easier. So, I was comfortable with that. Well, a couple of years ago, David Brightman from Stylus contacted me, asking me to write a book on critical thinking. And I thought, “Well, I’m kind of enjoying being semi-lazy and just traveling around, oh, what fun.” And then I thought, “Well, look, I don’t know about this. But let me just start outlining the book and see how it feels.” Well, it felt really good. I was amazed. [LAUGHTER] And I thought, “Okay, lazy is not so interesting to me anymore. I’m going to write this book.” Well, he was happy. I was happy. And so I immediately started writing it, and because I had these workshops to work off of… updated by reading of the literature, of course… but other than that, it was probably the easiest book I’ve ever written. And so, this is fun, this is neat, this is great. And so I finished it really very quickly. And I was glad to do it. I finished it in four months or so… four to five months, the whole….

Rebecca: Wow..

Linda: Yeah, I know. Well, I was a house afire and I had nothing better to do. [LAUGHTER] So anyway, that’s how I was inspired to do it. It was really David Brightman ‘s idea. And if he was excited about it, that kind of got me excited about it. And I knew the need was out there. I knew the need because there were still universities crazy enough to adapt critical thinking as a QEP. I had also acquired some friends in the critical thinking community by then and so “Okay, this is fine. This is great. I’m going to do this.” And so I did it. And so now it’s due out March, maybe April, because you never know about these things. So it’s really happened. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I found that a lot of faculty really believe in the idea of critical thinking, but have no idea how to define it or explain it to students.

Linda: Yes. And that’s a perfectly reasonable reaction for them to have, because of the massive literature out there. And it’s just the idea of critical thinking, it’s such an abstract, squishy, ephemeral idea. And we’re like, “What is it?” …and of course all faculty think they’re teaching it, right? But they’re not ,unless you make critical thinking, an outcome, a specific outcome that makes sense in your course. And you tell your students about it, and you call it what it is, that you’re not teaching critical thinking. It’s not going to happen by osmosis. It’s not going to happen by happy accident. Critical Thinking just doesn’t do that, it has to be a very, very conscious effort. And there’s a lot of literature to back this up.

Rebecca: So what is it? [LAUGHTER]

Linda: Oh, that’s a good follow up question. Well, I’m not going to go through the litany of definitions that you can find out there in the literature. But what I was able to glean from that literature is this: it’s interpretation, analysis, and/or evaluation, for the purpose of making some sort of decision or solving some sort of problem. And that’s it. But you could get definitions out there that go on for a couple of paragraphs, you can get definitions that seem to change color from one chapter to the next. I mean, they’re all there. And I just found it very confusing myself. But again, it was all about synthesis to me… all about synthesis, taking the best from these different silos, these different frameworks, and try to put them together into something that’s easiest, into a pocket definition: interpretation, analysis, evaluation. Now, you can put that in your pocket. And so can students.

Rebecca: I’m sold. [LAUGHTER]

Linda: Alright. That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful.

John: I remember when we introduced a critical thinking Gen Ed requirement here at Oswego, that everyone agreed that that was something that was desperately needed. It’s just everybody had a different idea of what it was. [LAUGHTER] And so eventually, it became infused within the disciplines. But I still think that that discussion of what exactly it is was never really resolved. It was kind of a way of sublimating that whole discussion and debate. So is critical thinking the same across disciplines? Or is it really going to be different depending on your disciplinary context or lens?

Linda: Okay, well, when you’re talking about interpretation, analysis, evaluation, yeah, that goes across the disciplines. But that’s not of much help to faculty. And so I put it in the disciplines, or I should say, in disciplinary clusters, because let’s face it, chemistry shares a lot with biology, right? …just in terms of general approach to observation, its approach to testing, just the general scientific thinking. And the humanities, there are a lot in common. And by the way, sometimes the social sciences pretend to be humanities, when you’re talking about the theories and things like that. Now, the social sciences, I look at them as sciences. So I put them in that scientific cluster. And then they’re the arts. Well, they’re off somewhere else entirely. They’ve got all….

Rebecca: Hey! [LAUGHTER]

Linda: Ah… oh, I’m sorry. You’re in it. But the arts are in a beautiful place. And they’re far more beautiful than the other disciplines. And then there are the, what I call the Applied Sciences, they’re different still. Oh yes, they share some overlap with the sciences. But so what I do is, there’s one chapter where I talk all about critical thinking outcomes by these disciplinary clusters. And now I have a list of different outcomes for each cluster. So take your pick, add more, but it’ll sound familiar to faculty. It’s using their vocabulary, it’s addressing their concerns, the sort of things that they strive to teach, the sort of things that they want their students to be able to do. And so I like to put it in the, at least, disciplinary clusters. Now it’s still you know, yes, you have to bring it down to your particular discipline, and then your particular course. But other than that, there are all kinds of tremendous overlap. But it’s such a different context. Sometimes you’re not even using the same verbs, and you’re certainly not using the same direct objects. I can assure you of that.

Rebecca: Why do faculty think it’s so hard to teach?

Linda: Oh, well, they’ve sure got good reasons. And I have a whole chapter on 10 reasons why teaching critical thinking is so challenging, and it’s got all kinds of reasons. First, there’s the literature, okay, that’s reason zero, okay. And so, I’m sort of, in a sense, telling faculty “Don’t read the literature, just don’t worry about that, or pick one and have fun” … whatever, but that’s not going to help you a lot. And that’s what’s different about my book, that mine’s, again, practical, concrete… here’s what you do… connect the dots. But reason number one is critical thinking about certain kinds of thinking, like that definition I gave you, but also a certain kind of subject matter. And there are courses out there that don’t have that subject matter. There has to be, in this subject matter, it has to be content containing claims, statements that may or may not be complete, valid, or at least the most valid, or the most viable, and for perfectly good reasons as well. For instance, there might be other respectable competing claims, the evidence supporting a claim may be weak or ambiguous, the data may be suspect, the source may have a lack of legitimacy or conflict of interest. So anyway, there are some courses that just seem to just be teaching undisputed facts. Now, if you’re teaching disputed facts, that’s fine, then you could talk about critical thinking. But there has to be some sort of dispute, some sort of competition, something among different claims. And again, there are, unfortunately, some courses that don’t have that… now you can add them in. Another thing about teaching critical thinking… It’s difficult for people to do, for students to do and it’s unnatural for students, for learners, for people to do, because we all want our current beliefs and values and ways of thinking confirmed. That’s what we are usually going for. And then there’s the whole struggle of learning. Learning is struggle, learning is effort. And students don’t seem to accept that. It’s like we’re supposed to make learning so easy. As easy as it was in elementary and high school. Isn’t that our job? …to make learning easy and effortless? No. But in any case, they might fight that: “Well, this is hard. So you’re not a good teacher. And anyway, students also bring biases and misconceptions into the classes that interfere with critical thinking. They’re not aware of these, and so you have to make them aware of them. And students don’t necessarily like that. Critical thinking requires self regulation, or metacognition. If you’re not observing your thinking, there’s no way you can think critically, I’m sorry, you have to question yourself all the time. But you’ve got to be aware of what that thinking is to even talk about it. Here’s another one and it’s nasty. Critical thinking requires the traits of good character. So virtues like integrity and determination and morality and inner strength. And some of our students just don’t have those virtues. Now, there are ways, there really are ways, that you can teach them about good character and bad character. And just the way good character is portrayed in our media and our literature, in movies, television, whatever, it makes good character look good, makes it look more attractive. But students don’t necessarily know what even good character is. And they can’t do self-regulated learning without having some intellectual virtues, like perseverance, like wanting to pursue truth, intellectual integrity, intellectual humility, certain dispositions that are absolutely essential. Otherwise, why bother to do critical thinking? Why put yourself through this? Here’s another thing that critical thinking requires: mental health, emotional health. Now, on the level that you can start increasing students’ mental health is on the level of defense mechanisms. But if you’ve got students out there, and I bet you do, who have personality disorders, they’re narcissists, they;re sociopaths, they’re psychopaths, so they might murder you someday. Forget about them, don’t even have hope for them. They have no interest in pursuing truth at all. That’s why they don’t wind up in the psychiatrist’s office. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing’s wrong,” right? And so what’s wrong with my thinking? Nothing’s wrong with my thinking. So they’re not into this, forget about them. Critical Thinking also requires students to respond to questions. And students don’t always like to respond to questions. They don’t mind telling you what day of the week it is. But beyond that, if they’re going to have to think, they might not be eager to do this. Now, if everybody else is doing it in the class, that helps. It really does. So yeah, there are all kinds of reasons why critical thinking is very difficult to teach, but it’s not impossible, and it’s not mystical.

John: You mentioned self regulation, what are some techniques that we can use in our classes to help students become more self regulated in terms of developing critical thinking skills that let them analyze evidence more effectively and interpret arguments more effectively?

Linda: Yes, well, again, awareness is where you start. So the first thing you want to do, the first habit that you want to develop in your class is whenever you have students give a statement… I don’t mean an undisputed definition, okay, I mean something that’s addressing a claim or making a claim in some way? And you’ve got to just keep asking them: “Well, how did you arrive at that response?” Now, you’re going to sound like a broken record the first couple of weeks, and then students will realize, “Okay, I’m not going to talk unless I have an answer to that question, because I know that Professor so and so is going to ask me this question.” So they start to think about this on their own, and they’re ready to answer it, or they’ll keep their mouth shut. But it’s not so impossible to look into your head as to how you came up with a certain answer. And initially, students will have to say, like, “I don’t know,” and you know what, that’s okay. Because now you have their attention. If they don’t know that that’s a perfectly fine answer, you need to start thinking about that, you need to start observing your thinking. And that’s the first thing you get them to do. Now, in terms of like, with readings, or if you’re having them watch videos and these sorts of things, you can give them reflective assignments to accompany those readings, and for that matter accompany any other kind of assignment. But what you want them to do is you want them to reflect on perhaps their affective reactions to the reading, or what they found particularly important, or what they found particularly surprising when they do a reading and then they have to answer this question or couple of questions at the end. And again, there are no wrong answers. This is like no stress, folks, just I want at least 100 words from you, that students start looking over what they just read and thinking about it from their own viewpoint. What did they find most important? How did they react emotionally? What connections did they make to what they already knew. So it’s making them more aware of what kind of impact that reading had. And those are just the simplest things in the world with substantial assignments, writing assignments, what you want your students to do is sort of a meta assignment at the same time. And again, you can’t go wrong, folks. And all you’ve got to do as a faculty member is just to check these in, just make sure that they did it and if you want 200 words, perhaps, “Okay, describe your reasoning in solving this problem.” or ”How did you reason through this case, in debriefing this case? What questions did you ask yourself along the way? What skills did you improve in the course of doing this assignment?” There’s so many different possibilities. And so, yeah, self awareness, self awareness. And then, of course, after a test when they get a graded exam back, make them aware of how they prepared or how they didn’t prepare. And so it’s making them face the music about, “Okay, what did you expect to get on this exam? And what did you get?” Gee whiz, how do you feel about that? Now, “A” students are gonna “Oh, yeah, I thought I got an A,” or I thought I’d get a “B” but I got an “A,” and so I feel whoopee.” Okay, don’t worry about them. They’re already self regulating, they self regulate to the point of paranoia, they’re the least of your worries. [LAUGHTER] But other students need to become aware of, “Okay, so how did you study? Did you study the way I told you too, which is quizzing yourself? Or do you just reread, reread, reread, reread the way I told you not to, because that’s a waste of time? How many hours did you study? Was this enough? What are you going to do differently on the next exam to do better?” And so students have to think about a strategy, they’re meta-studying in a way. And so they’re thinking about their learning strategies. And they really need to do a lot more of that. Any kinds of like, experiential activities… there are all kinds of questions that they can ask themselves, or you can ask them to write about, “Well, what were your goals originally? And how did they change through the simulation or the game or the role playing?” And this would be true of like service learning or field work or any of these things. “How did you respond to other people involved in the interactions? And why would you respond differently next time?” So there’s a lot of self assessment going on. And this is a good place to start with self assessment. It’s a safe place to start with self assessment, because usually everybody changes their strategy from the beginning through the middle to the end. And that’s good. That’s what they’re supposed to be doing. That’s called learning. [LAUGHTER] But it makes them aware of that learning. That’s how you do it. Yeah.

John: It sounds like there’s quite a bit of overlap between improving students’ critical thinking skills and improving students’ metacognition,

Linda: Absolutely.

John: Is it effectively the same type of strategy used in both cases? Or is it essentially the same process In both cases?

Linda: What’s different about it is with critical thinking, you’re dealing with real disciplinary content. And you’re not necessarily doing that with metacognition. Yes, self awareness is definitely a part of critical thinking. But that’s not all. I mean, you’re actually trying to come to some sort of conclusion or solve some sort of problem, maybe even decide to take some sort of action. You’re examining claims, you’re examining data, you’re examining sources, you’re examining a lot of different things along the way that you’re not necessarily doing in metacognition, but metacognition, it precedes critical thinking. I mean, if you’re not aware of how you’re thinking, how in the world, are you going to come up with a well reasoned approach to a problem? So there’s a lot more. You’re using metacognition, to extend reasoning into something that is disciplinary based.

Rebecca: I’m so glad we’re having this conversation today. Because I’m working on a new class where practicing thinking moving into higher-level classes is the goal of the class. And so I was working on a lot of reflection assignments. So I was just doing a little editing while we were chatting. [LAUGHTER]

Linda: Oh. alright, See, I’m glad this is useful, and that’s the whole thing. I want that book to be useful. And that’s what makes it, I think, different from the other books out there and critical thinking, because most of them are in a particular silo, they’re coming from a particular silo, they’re may be extending that silo in some way. And I was looking for common ground across multiple silos, and then maybe not all of them, but multiple silos, I tell you one thing that they all have in common, they all say that critical thinking involves metacognition or self regulation.

John: And I remember reading a really good book on creating self-regulated learning.

Linda: Oh yeah, that one, yeah.

John: That might be something we’d recommend to faculty.

Linda: Yes.

John: We’ll include that in the show notes as well.

Linda: Okay, good. Yes, indeed, I’m glad I wrote that book beforehand. I really am. [LAUGHTER]

John: And it ties in nicely with a lot of your discussion in the book. In this new book, you’re also addressing how specifications grading could be used. And I know there’s a really nice book on that as well.

Linda: Oh yeah, yeah.I remember that one.

John: You mentioned that when you grade things, that it doesn’t necessarily require a lot of work for the faculty member. Could you just talk a little bit about how specifications grading could be used to evaluate these types of activities?

Linda: Sure, absolutely. First of all, all assignments, not courses, all assignments are graded pass/fail, and for that matter tests, but you don’t pass either a test or an assignment at a C level, you raise your expectations to a B level. But guess what, you’ve got to know what components in that essay or that paper or whatever that design that you want to see to achieve a B level. Now, if you already have rubrics, fine, you can start looking at the top level of the rubric and maybe take a few from the next one down. But those are the things that have to be in the piece of work for it to pass. And by the way, you explain this to students. Now the stakes suddenly become higher for students. So guess what? They read the directions? Isn’t it wonderful? They do, they want to pass. Now, initially, they don’t believe that they could possibly fail at anything because of partial credit. Well, guess what, there is no partial credit here. But they won’t believe it till they fail something. So you always want to give them some get out of jail free cards, so they can maybe fail a couple of times, and then redo the assignment the correct way, because they realize, “Oh, he or she is really serious about this. Oh, goodness. Okay.” So yeah, they really start reading the directions and doing what you asked them to do. And you know what? If they’re worried that they’re not doing it, they visit you, they call you, they email you, they actually ask for clarification, because this means something. And we’ve been lowering the stakes and lowering the stakes and lowering the stakes for years now, because we don’t want to cause them any stress. Well, you know what? We’re going to have to cause some stress. Learning is stressful, sorry. It’s just the way life is. So anyway, when you know what you want to see there, and this is where the thinking is… this thinking it might be before the course starts. So once the course starts, you’re on easy street, because all you have to do is look for those elements in the piece of work that the student hands in. Something missing? You mark which element is missing. If you want to make other comments, hey, far be it for me to tell you not to write comments. But you don’t have to, you don’t have to, and relatively short assignments. You don’t have to, unless you want to. I mean, if you’ve got a student, they had all the elements in that, you want to draw a happy face, knock yourself out. [LAUGHTER]

John: Or at least for the artists, among us. [LAUGHTER]

Linda: Exactly. Now, if you want to go specs grading… because we’re talking about specs, we’re talking about specifications, like in a computer program, essentially… but you really have to look in the mirror and say, “What do I want my students to be able to demonstrate that they can do in this assignment, or on this test, or in this particular essay?” And that can be hard, because we’ve never had to be so specific, but this is what students love about specs grading. We get specific, we tell them what we want, they know what our expectations are, and they haven’t known, this might be the first time they’ve ever really known, what we wanted, because we have to be specific. And if we left out a specs that we wish we’d put in, well, better luck next semester, right? Just remember to put those in. But you can’t change those once you give students your list of specs. And then there’s bundling. With specs grading, you can also bundle assignments and tests together for various grades where students decide, “Oh, you know, you have to do so much work for an A, and it looks very difficult. I’m not going to go for an A. How about if I go for a B and that way this isn’t that important of a course to me. It’s alright.” And they might decide to go for a C. And you know what? what should you care? This is their decision, and if they’re going to be happy with a C, you can respect that. And otherwise, we look at C students like, well they were lazy and didn’t care and this and that. No, no, no. Students choose it for themselves. Fine. No problem. We don’t look down on our C students, as we unfortunately will kind of do sometimes. Anyway, but that specs grading. We’re on critical thinking and critical thinking, if you have the specs for something written, or a presentation for that matter, but if you know what you want students to show that they can do in terms of critical thinking, this is an easy way to grade, it really is. All the work is upfront.

Rebecca: Yep. It’s very time consuming upfront with what I’m doing right now. [LAUGHTER]

Linda: And it’s stressful. It’s stressful for us, because we “Oh, should I give this five points or six points?” Forget it. Don’t worry about that. And you know, students will go to you and argue for a half a point, they don’t mess with that with specs grading at all. They don’t do that. So it saves you a lot of wear and tear. And it’s better for your relationship with your students.

John: In large classes, how can you help students develop critical thinking skills if you don’t want to read lots of written work?

Linda: Ah, okay. Well, this is the beauty of groups. There are two methods that are particularly important in teaching critical thinking, there’s discussion, and that includes, by the way, debate…. debate’s really good, but discussion, debate. And you might have to do that in terms of just teaching in small groups. And that’s okay. Because the whole idea is that students are getting different points of view on a claim or a statement or something like that and then they have to defend it. But that’s all something that you can have students do in groups, those sorts of activities. Another thing that’s very important are some kinds of problems to solve. And I don’t mean the cookbook types. I’m talking about complex problems, fuzzy problems, if you will. And again, usually we have students work in groups for that, anyway. So that’s how you can teach it in large classes. It’s lovely if you have a small class, and everybody can hear everybody else’s statements and discussions and things like that. But if you don’t have that luxury, you can still teach critical thinking in large classes. And again, this is where spec grading can really, really shine. Because your grading time is cut to a fraction, an absolute fraction. Let me say one other thing. I talked about methods, but really the key to teaching critical thinking is questions, the questions that you ask your students, whether it be in class, or whether it be a writing assignment, or a paper or for a design or presentations, whatever it is, the key is questions. And each silo, each framework offers certain questions, that here you should have your students do this or answer these questions. So what I did was I put all of those together, synthesized them into a list of 45 critical thinking questions. Take your pick. Now, of course, you can look at your outcomes, and they make excellent assignments and questions and things like that. But these are general questions that make students think critically. And of course, you always follow up with “Well, gee, how did you come to that response? How did you arrive at that?” So anyway, there are certain questions that guarantee students are doing critical thinking and you have to adapt it to your particular class, but a lot of them, they go across the disciplines. And this is where you can see some of the similarities, like asking about the source of a claim, for instance, can you trust this source?”

Rebecca: How do we help students that come in with biases, preconceptions and things?

Linda: Oh, yes, absolutely.

Rebecca: …resisting facts. How do we start to overcome that?

Linda: Well, I think what you need to do is you start your course… you might have to start your course anyway… with selling critical thinking to your students. Because first of all, critical thinking is a skill that employers want. And I start my book with that, just so much evidence of that, say analytical thinking and that’s the same sort of thing. But there’s also beyond employment, there’s a quality of life. Now, if your students do not want to be suckers and fools, and if they don’t learn to think critically, that’s exactly what they’re going to be, suckers and fools. For instance, it takes critical thinking to avoid scams and shams. And if you google “scams,” you get billions of hits. It’s horrifying. Questioning and other things like they don’t know how to make sense out of popularized research studies. Well, a critical thinker knows enough to check those things. Advertising, that’s another place where you have to be very discriminating. And you have to critically think about “Well, what did that mean that such and such is twice as effective? Twice as effective as what? And what does ‘twice as effective’ mean?” There’s propaganda, fake news, disinformation, demagoguery, doublespeak, all this stuff to cover up the truth. And what students don’t know… a lot of people just don’t know… is there are fact-checking sites out there, there are quite a few of them. I talked about eight of them in my book, and how to get there and where it’s from, who puts this together. But it’s a good idea, I would say to give students an early exercise. And it could be, if you’re teaching chemistry, make it chemistry, if you’re teaching political science, make it political science, politics, to give them some fact-checking assignments. And if you’re worried about the politics, like all of these sites will call both sides of the political debate down on their lies or their distortion. So they’re fair that way. And so, if you want to get students to question their own politics, it’s great if you can get some good examples of things that they can go research where there’re lies on both sides, and that shows them that. But then they start realizing, “Oh, my god, there are lies. Oh, goodness, I’ve been believing all this.” There is Politifact.com. There is FactCheck. There is FlackCheck. There is OpenSecrets, Media Bias / Fact Check. There’s apnews.com/apfactcheck. There’s Snopes. There’s Truthorfiction.com. I mean, there’re all these sites. There’s so many of them, and that’s just the few that I talked about, because they tend to be better known. And they’re put out by like AP or something or Annenberg Foundation. And so that will teach them how much is garbage out there. Again, from both sides. Both sides in the political debate are full of garbage. But you also have debates going on in biology or in medicine. Remember, I’m sure you do, when they were saying, “Oh, coffee is terribly bad for you.” And then three years later, “Oh, it’s very good for you.” So it really hits all fields. Some of my very favorite ones is doublespeak. And I don’t know if students are aware of doublespeak like “servicing the target.” That’s military talk for bombing, to service a target. Yeah. “Neutralize” that means to kill. “Downsizing” means firing employees, “misconduct,” white-collar crimes committed by politicians, business leaders, military professionals, the police, that’s misconduct versus crime. “Detainee” is a prisoner of war. I mean, I could go on and on and on. And I do in my book.

John: You mentioned how important critical thinking skills are to employers. What does the evidence show about how effective colleges are in terms of helping students improve their critical thinking skills?

Linda: we’re not so hot, but it’s just put it that way. According to Academically Adrift, we improve the critical thinking skills of about one third of our students. Now, I don’t think that’s anything to celebrate myself. But I mean, at least we do that. But, these are often the students who came in with some critical thinking skills to begin with. The ones who need the help the most to critically think are not getting that help. They’re just not getting it. And so we’ve got to go out of our way to reach them. Again, most faculty think they’re teaching critical thinking when they’re not because they’re not consciously doing it. So there’s a sense in which we haven’t even scratched the surface of what we can teach in terms of critical thinking. And again, with all the different definitions out there, and all the different silos, I don’t blame faculty at all.

John: We can hope that your book will help reach more faculty and help us be more effective in this task.

Linda: Let me add one other thing that you can sell students on. Critical thinkers, and there’s research on this, tend to experience fewer difficulties in life than others do, whether they be health difficulties, financial, personal, legal, they just lead less troublesome lives. So if you kind of want to be happy, it’s a good idea to think critically, because it’ll keep you out of difficulty.

Rebecca: A good selling point, a good selling point.

Linda: Yes, it is a good selling point. [LAUGHTER] It is. And that’s just it. You might have to sell students on it. And you’re going to have to explain what critical thinking is to students, but they can take that pocket definition. It’s not negative thinking. It’s not just criticizing things. It’s nothing like that at all. And it’s not leftist, that’s not it at all. But they need that clarification because they’re coming in with misconceptions about what critical thinking is. And what the words sound like. Maybe it’s not a really good name for it, but that’s what we’ve been calling it. So we’re stuck with it.

Rebecca: It also seems like faculty make a lot of assumptions about students knowing how to analyze or how to interpret and what the question focus that you’ve indicated we should pay attention to, is really getting at that by asking the questions to get them to do the activity that we want them to do, when they might not know what that word actually means. Because it’s not been modeled.

Linda: Exactly, we should stop and model and then say, “You know, this is an analysis question that I’m asking you or that I just asked you.” We need to label things, so students get to understand what these cognitive operations are. And unfortunately, we make assumptions and studentsmight say, “Oh, analysis, that something a shrink does.” No, no, no, no, no, no. Interpretation. “Well, that’s something that people who read novels do.” No, we are all doing it all the time. So even chemists do interpretation. You interpret the data, and you can come up with different things.

Rebecca: And a lot of students get stuck right on describe, they don’t go much past that, and they don’t know that that’s what they’re doing

Linda: …or summarize. Yeah.

Rebecca: I’ve had conversations with students about those kinds of words before and it was really productive.

Linda: Yeah, yeah. because nobody’s really told them what these words mean.

John: It seems that higher ed is not doing quite as well as we’dlike in terms of increasing students critical thinking skills. Should this be an important focus for higher ed?

Linda: First of all, the buck stops with us. Otherwise, they go out into the world. And they could be adrift in general, without our teaching them critical thinking. They’re not likely to learn this in K through 12. I’m sorry. Oh, yes, they will in prep schools, but we don’t worry about those kids. So we have to keep people who are in power, and people with money honest, and the only people who really have ever wound up doing that are fairly well educated people. That’s why higher education is so important. And unfortunately, over the years… certainly, from when I was in college to now… the whole reason people go to college, and what they want out of college has changed. Now they want a job. Well, I hate to use this phrase. Back in my day, we wanted to develop a sound, sophisticated philosophy of life. Now that fits right in with critical thinking, critical thinking was very much a part of it. But now, that’s kind of like out the window. Well, to keep a job, you need to become a critical thinker. This is what employers need. This is what the world needs. And we can’t do good production without it. But even more important than that, we talk about freedom, for this society, any society, our freedom lies in our awareness of our patterns of human cognition, how they can be exploited, these patterns. And just, in general, our awareness of this worldwide pandemic of dishonesty in the pursuit of money and power, and it’s almost considered okay, because it’s all around us, we see it. Well guess what? It’s not okay unless we say it’s okay. So if we want to preserve freedom, we absolutely need this awareness. And it’s not like we’re doing something that hasn’t been done before. Because really, this awareness and this watchdog-type thinking really gave rise to a lot of successful movements, the environmental protection movement, the conservation movement, sustainability, recycling, stronger vehicle safety standards, and that’s just to name a few. And they all came out of critical thinking and awareness of where our weaknesses as human beings are. We all have a mind… well, almost all of us have a mind… and we need to know how it works so we can protect ourselves from all the advertising and scams and shams of demagoguery… which by the way, appeals to emotions… to all these different trips that individual institutions, organizations, corporations are trying to lay on us. And they are, because, hey, its profitable to lay the sawdust if we buy into it, we can’t afford to. We should not.

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

Linda: Ah, yes. What’s next? Well, first of all, I hope getting back to travel.

Rebecca: Me too.

JON: Me too.

Linda: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Doing workshops and keynotes instead of this virtual nonsense where you’re talking into a screen. To see an audience tells me everything about what I need to do next in the workshop or in the keynote. But aside from that, I’m just finishing up another book: Online Teaching at its Best, the second edition. And in the second edition I talk about the kinds of teaching we’ve been doing lately, like remote teaching, hyflex teaching, Well, hybrid, we’ve been doing, but talking about it in another way. And in addition to the fully online learning that we talked about… Ludie Goodson and I talked about in the first edition… but the second edition has a lot more about what we’ve been doing lately because it’s possible universities and colleges might decide to keep some of this remote stuff. Hyflex is very much a disaster when you’re dealing with this pandemic and masks and all that. But, anyway, universities might say, “Hey, you know, it’s cheaper to do remote, we don’t have to build any more buildings, students can learn at home, hey, students might like that.” But again, they might not. But I’m afraid they’re going to do this with conferences, and it just makes me want to cry. Let’s do virtual conferences. We don’t have to pay hotel bills. And people don’t have to worry about getting travel funding. But in any case, it worries me that we’re going to get too accustomed to and accepting of, this virtual communication, which we all know, deep inside of our hearts, that’s not as good as human face-to-face contact. So anyway, but that’s next, that book will be coming out, I think, in the summer. And right now Ludie and I have the manuscript in but we’re still doing some pre-production stuff having to do with author queries, proofs, all that nonsense that makes you wish you didn’t write the book. [LAUGHTER] Writing is the fun part. This isn’t. But I’ll do it. I promise.

John: More information on effective online teaching, I think, is especially important these days. And I think we’re gonna see a lot more people doing it even when the pandemic is over, now that people have learned that it can work.

Linda: Yeah, it can work. But we just started doing these things, not knowing how to make it work. And learning has suffered, grades have suffered, and rigor has suffered. So far, no real good has come out of the switch. It can, it can, and that’s what the second edition will hopefully begin to do.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us again, and having such a rich conversation.

Linda: Well, thank you for this opportunity. This has been great. Thank you.

John: And our faculty very much appreciates all the work you did with ACUE as well, because they keep bringing up some of the things they learned watching some of your videos in that course.

Linda: Oh, good. I’m glad to hear that. Well, thank you ever so much for this chance to talk about a book that isn’t even out yet but that I’m truly in love with.

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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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175. Embracing Change

Faculty who had to shift to teaching online for the first time due to the pandemic were forced to confront their habits and typical ways of teaching in order to adapt to and support students in a new modality. In this episode,  Colin and Jonikka Charlton join us to discuss ways in which faculty and departments have embraced and resisted change during this transition. Colin is the chair of the Department of Writing and Language Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Jonikka is the Associate Provost for Student Success and Dean of University College, also at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Faculty who had to shift to teaching online for the first time due to the pandemic were forced to confront their habits and typical ways of teaching in order to adapt to and support students in a new modality. In this episode, we discuss ways in which faculty and departments have embraced and resisted change during this transition.

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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: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Our guests today are Colin and Jonikka Charlton. Colin is the chair of the Department of Writing and Language Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Jonikka is the Associate Provost for Student Success and Dean of University College, also at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. Welcome.

Jonikka: Thank you.

Colin: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Colin: I’m actually drinking blackberry sage, made by a company I don’t remember because I’m freezing, ‘cause It’s like 50 here. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That sounds really warm. I’ll go with that.

Jonikka: I’m just a water drinker. Colin’s the tea drinker in the family.

John: I am drinking a chocolate mint oolong tea.

Rebecca: Well, that sounds good.

John: It is. It was a gift from my son.

Rebecca: I was gonna say, I think that’s a new one for the podcast, John.

John: I think it is.

Colin: That’s pretty cool.

Rebecca: I have a new one today, too. I have a Palm Court blend from Harney and Sons.

John: Ok. We’ve invited you here to discuss some of the challenges associated with teaching writing during a pandemic. But first, could you tell us a little bit about how your institution has handled and adjusted instruction during the pandemic?

Jonikka: Yeah, I guess I’ll start from kind of a wider institutional perspective. I was honestly really surprised and really proud of the institution, because when we switched to online really rapidly in the spring, we kind of stayed there. And so there wasn’t a lot of pressure internally, or even externally, for us to have a lot of students on campus. And in the valley, the households are generally pretty large. So there are extended families, large families, living in the same household. And so the threat, I think, was a little bit higher, potentially, than in some other areas. And people having barbecues and family get togethers all of the time, it’s really, really important. So in the spring, we were completely online, we started having to distinguish between asynchronous modality and synchronous modality. And then we pretty much kept that for the fall semester, there were probably maybe 8,10 percent, a mix of hybrid courses and face to face. And then now in the spring, I was just looking before we got on here, and it’s about a third asynchronous, a third synchronous, and about 18% is face to face and the rest are hybrid. And we’re really starting, even those hybrid, are starting online. And hopefully, if we get as many people as possible vaccinated, then we maybe can move toward the end of the semester, a little bit more people onto campus. But that’s kind of the way we have. We did a huge investment in online faculty development over the summer. And so the fall was when we got to really test and see how that worked and get some feedback from students, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit today.

Colin: I can speak from the developmental, and, I guess, the program level. So we did tons of training, as Jonikka said. I think the bulk of the response at the very beginning, whenever that was, I feel like it was a year ago, but it’s actually just a few months. So the bulk of it was invested in technology, both in terms of trying to figure out how to help students get access when they were sitting in Burger King parking lots trying to get Wi Fi at the very beginning, but that disappeared so quickly. So it’s like having whiplash from rapid response kind of triage stuff, like, something happens, Spectrum gives everybody free Wi Fi. We don’t have enough bandwidth to have more than so many Zoom meetings or recordings, and then we get an extension and now we have unlimited hours or something like that. It’s like being part of a really gigantic cable company, they keep giving you more stuff to try to make sure everything keeps working, [LAUGHTER] except the cable company actually works in your favor in this case. So there’s a lot of technology stuff, a lot of blueprinting for online classes. For faculty support, there emerged a need for psychological and wellness and self-care support. But that really wasn’t as much at the front of what was happening. But you can tell that people were starting to need it because there was a lot of discomfort and just unfamiliarity. And a lot of people doing things they knew they had to do, but they didn’t know how to do them with the technology side of it. And then from the program side, department side, at least in our department, we backed away from a lot of that and tried to offer something as an alternative to talk about concepts, because a lot of the work was in the logistics of getting things built and getting classes built, making sure people understood that you have to tell students how to navigate your courses, because that was a new thing for a lot of faculty, right? And at the same time, I’m trying to basically, not reinvent the wheel, but trying to get people in the department to have a talk about what engagement is and what teaching is, which I know probably sounds weird as a thing to do. But we had to have that discussion in a very small, private, disturbing, communication, like difficult conversations kind of moment. I guess it was conceptual training that was going on or retraining. And then there was also institutional support, that, I think probably allowed us to do the other because I don’t think if we had had the technology part stripped away from us or we had to be responsible for ourselves, I don’t think we would have found the space to do the wellness stuff and the conceptual training. I don’t know how widespread that was. I know every department handled it a different way. But we’re a big department. And we handle so many freshmen that we just had to do it for the writing program and for the language programs and all of those things, which went from zero asynchronous to literally 100% asynchronous writing classes over the course of the summer. That was a big lift.

John: That’s a pretty dramatic shift from going from zero to 100%. How did the faculty adjust? How did they come out of those difficult conversations?

Colin: At the Dean’s level, at least for our college, we were told we could let the faculty decide what they wanted to do in terms of their own level of comfort and preparedness, right? And so you had a few people who wanted to know just how protected were they’re going to make the classrooms because they couldn’t teach with a mask on and they couldn’t teach online. And so they felt like they had to have a situation where they were going to be with their students, and even getting some of those faculty to understand that they could only meet with half their students once a week and the other half. because of the room size constraints, like those conversations had to happen. So those faculty were incredibly stressed. And so faculty were making their own decisions. And I was trying to coordinate all of that, so that at least made sense, so that there would be as little damage done. Plus, I live with Jonakka, and she says things like “You don’t have any synchronous classes for writing. Are you stupid?” like, “What have you done?” [LAUGHTER] And she reminds me that I must have made a mistake somewhere, but that’s what faculty chose to do. But when you talk to the faculty who chose to do that, who I couldn’t believe some of the faculty that asked to do that, it was because they thought they were doing the students a favor, because it would allow the students to arrange the rest of their schedule. We get through summer, we survive the fall, we have already made the schedule for the spring. And then about half of those teachers said, “You know what, you were right. I want to do synchronous, but is that going to hurt the students?” And so those faculty had even more adjustments to make, I think, because they tried the asynchronous for the right reasons, but they lost more students than they were used to. They had difficulty with assignment completion, and all the things you have difficulties with every time you do a new class, but just kind of multiplied. But we have 97 people in the classroom in our department, that includes all the TAs, all the part-timers, everyone. So 43 of those are first-year writing teachers. And they were incredibly happy that 10 people blueprinted the courses for online asynchronous and just went with it. So that’s also something that you don’t often see. In a big program, you see a lot of people doing a lot of different things and asking if they can stretch the syllabus a little bit this direction. And nobody wanted to do that. Everybody was so worn out and tired. They were just like, “This syllabus is great, and when it doesn’t work in three weeks, I’m gonna blame you guys and feel just fine about all of it.” [LAUGHTER] So what does that mean? I guess there were new stressors they didn’t expect. And there were collaborative moments that they also didn’t expect. So they leaned into the stuff that you would expect them to be resistant to because of necessity, but they also then had better discussions, I think, about the purpose of teaching writing online, how you talk to students when you don’t see them in real time, that kind of stuff. I don’t think those conversations would have happened. So yeah, every time they would get comfortable, then it would be a new issue that came up about why are students disappearing and that kind of thing,

Rebecca: …a pandemic… time to get uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. [LAUGHTER] Right?

Jonikka: Yes.

Colin: Right. Learn to unlearn or learn to learn on a daily basis or…

Rebecca: …learn that you’re also a learner.

Jonikka: Exactly.

Colin: Exactly, and that it’s okay. I think that was the hardest part for our folks is, I set up teams and made people leaders that had never been leaders before for technology support to try to lift the burden away from the people you were expect to always go to because I knew what was going to happen. And that worked out great. But then they would also get lost in all the permutations of “Well, if you do it this way… if you do it this way.” So they burned through their need to explain how they do things in their class really, really quickly. Because you know how teachers do that thing there, unless I’m being unfair. It’s like, “Oh, let me give you three examples from my class about how great things go, or how terrible things go” …or whatever. They burned through all those anecdotes. And then they were left with the whole thing, like maybe the assignment really sucks and that’s why the students aren’t turning it in. Or maybe I was really boring on Monday and they just had to live with that. And that’s hard. [LAUGHTER] Is that not true, Jonikka?

Jonikka: I was just reminded, it’s really interesting to me that the writing program has a lot of really great teachers. It’s a very robust culture of teaching in that department at the institution. And so what I saw both there and across the institution was faculty who had their identity as being really great teachers who are able to engage students and their students come back and they do well. And so you saw a lot of those faculty whose students just disappeared, and then they were like, this has never happened to me before or not since I first started teaching. And so I think there’s that component of it, that it took us probably four or five or six months to get to that place when people realize I had a whole semester of this and I’m not having the same success I had before and I think we have to have conversations and find places for faculty to have those conversations and to know that it’s okay. It doesn’t mean that they were a fraud all along, or they didn’t do a good job and that sort of thing. So what you said reminded me of that.

Rebecca: It really is a different space.

Jonikka: Yes,.

Colin: Yes. And I don’t know how many of the teachers that were really stressed were stressed because of access. Because honestly, if you’re teaching face to face, and you have students that aren’t showing up, you have the same problems trying to contact them. I think we all have a sense that because we’re seeing people regularly, that we’re somehow seeing them more often, which is totally false. And so I had so many emails from faculty about how do I get in touch with students who won’t respond to me? And I’m like, I know what they were saying. But it’s a silly question, right? It’s like, “everybody who’s not here today, raise your hand” kind of question. You can’t get in touch with them, because they’re not paying attention to you. And you can’t make them pay attention to you if they’re not paying attention to you. But that reality was just heartbreaking for some of them. And we’re talking about people that are really just stressing over like having a 14% drop rate, because they’re used to having a 3% drop rate, or if like a DFW rate is like 3%. But our enrollment was up. What was it up, J?

Jonikka: it was like 18%, it was huge. We had a huge influx of new students in the fall, largest breaking enrollment and all of that. And so we also had the pressure of really huge classes. So that just exacerbated the whole thing, I think. We had lots of students who didn’t go to Austin, or they didn’t go to Rice, or wherever they stayed. A lot of that was that too.

Colin: And nobody wants to hear me say, and I’m the last person that wants to say it, but nobody wants to hear your department chair say, “Look, when you have a 16% increase in enrollment, you’re going to lose some people, because there have to be a high percentage of those people coming in who are somehow not college ready, or who are experimenting or who are at risk, and we have no way to help them or support them, because we don’t know why they’re here. Because this is unprecedented.” And so that doesn’t help.

John: Most studies have found that freshmen are much more vulnerable when they’re in online classes, the drop-fail-withdrawal rate for freshmen and even sophomore students is a lot higher than it is for upper-level students. Add to that a pandemic. And then you mentioned a lot of additional students coming whose plans were not going in the direction they originally anticipated, which just adds to all the stress. But having a drop-fail-withdrawal rate in that range is pretty low, actually.

Jonikka: Yes, it absolutely is. And he’s talking about like some really great faculty in his department. That’s not the case across the institution. And I remember back in April, May, as we’re having these conversations about modality moving into the fall… it’s great… and I’m supportive of the idea. And it’s kind of amazing, actually, that as an institution, we said faculty choose your own modality. A lot of institutions didn’t do that. But I was trying to be the consistent voice that was saying, “But could we at least make some more strategic decisions around classes that freshmen are going to take, because your sophomores, juniors, and seniors and your grad students, they’re going to be able to adapt in ways that our freshmen are not. It’s one thing for a first-year student to come in and have one class out of five or six on their schedule that’s online. But we’re in a situation where literally their entire schedule was online, none of the courses were organized in the same way, even though they may all be using Blackboard it just looks different, the whole classes operate differently.” And so I was really worried about that. And I was right to worry about that. Because as we moved into the fall, our first-year persistence rate from fall to spring is down about six and a half percent from where it normally is. And everyone’s really concerned about that. And of course, attention is also starting to shift to this year’s seniors and what that first-year experience is going to be like next year. We did a survey and I’m sure at some point, we’ll talk about the survey. But even the students who did well said this was not for me. Yes, my grades look okay, but I don’t feel like I learned what I needed to, so I’m going to stop out in the spring. And like, “I’ll catch you on the other end in the fall, when hopefully things are okay and we’re back in an environment in which I feel like I can learn.” And so that’s been really startling, I think, to some on campus. We’re trying to figure out what we have control over and what we don’t have control over and how you can shift an entire institution’s worth of faculty. We could not have moved and said everybody’s going to be teaching at a really high level. And I think too, the pandemic and what’s happened has just kind of uncovered some things about teaching and what was going on in classrooms that I promise you is going on in face-to-face classrooms. But now it’s been uncovered and people are concerned about it and more heightened awareness, I think, around it. But, that’s one of the opportunities too. I think it’s enabled us to say “Hey, let’s shine a light on and have those conversations about what teaching and learning really is about and how do we engage students?” And I was really happy when I heard a few engineering faculty say, “You know what, when we go back face to face, we didn’t know what we had, we didn’t know the opportunity that we were kind of squandering before in our face-to-face classes. Now they’re talking about flipping their classroom.” And I’m like, okay, that’s 20 years ago, or whatever. [LAUGHTER] But now you’re in that place where you see why that would be helpful to you, and what you could do differently when you go back face to face. That’s exciting to me. I haven’t been in the classroom in a while, but my first love and my first identification is as a teacher, and asking those things about learning and teaching and why we’re doing what we’re doing. I think it’s great that more people are doing that.

Rebecca: I think the same kinds of themes have come up in a lot of conversations that we’ve had over the last few weeks with guests about what’s happening between the fall and the spring and students timing out and faculty changing what modality they’re teaching in, and also just reflection upon what they might want to do in the future, too. So it’s kind of these interesting themes that are happening that may have not have happened otherwise, for sure. I know, Colin, you mentioned faculty choosing to be more synchronous, perhaps in the spring, can you talk about some other things that were learned from the fall that are going to improve the experience for everybody in the spring?

Colin: I think it’s across our department. And I think there’s a lot more people across the university, too that realize that there’s no such thing as a neutral delivery method anymore. And I think people like me and Jonakka knew that, because our training in teaching actually made us teach in different ties, even if we weren’t comfortable with them. The more people, I think, understand something that when I ran the writing program, however, many years ago, that was probably nine years, I remember telling people, your students who will turn in their assignments if you teach them how to do the whole course in the first week, and then just repeat over and over again. And a few people would do that, but very few people would do it because they do what teachers tend to do when they’re content focused, which is they say, “I can’t get through that many chapters of a biology book, if I take a week out to teach them how my class works,” or “I can’t have them read as many articles as I want them to read, because I’m taking this time out to basically train them metacognitively on how to actually take a Colin class.” Right? People complaining about that, they left my department and were replaced by strange little clones that wanted to say, “Hey, is there any way we can extend the first two weeks and just do an introduction about what online learning is?” And they got all these ideas and even like, I remember, we opened Blackboard a week early in the fall, but not at this spring. Our people were contacting their students and talking about how the course was set up. So I think there’s awareness. I don’t know how deep the awareness is. But there is an awareness with at least our people who teach 4000 freshmen a year that you’re not designing your class for yourself and your students, you’re designing your class for the students who go to four or five other classes, because they will drop you quicker than other people if they don’t feel like they have an anchor in your class. And sometimes that’s understanding how to navigate, sometimes that’s having a personal connection with a teacher, sometimes it’s knowing your peers’ names, whatever that engagement factor is, if they have it in your class, they will stick with your class, which means in a writing class, there’s more of a chance we’ll stick with their other classes, because we’re usually the ones that get dropped, I think. Either us or math, unless, J, you have different statistics. I think anecdotally, when we talk to students who haven’t been coming to class, and we find out they’re not doing well, they will usually stop coming to the writing class, because they feel like there’s no way to make it up. So I think there’s a sense across the writing instructors now that it’s not okay to build designs that work for 75% of the people. And then there’s this 10%, that will average out in the middle. And then there’s 10% that just don’t see how to get over the hump because they never have a success, or they never see an end product. And so they just cut that class. More like an algebra approach, you don’t understand the first three chapters of algebra and you feel like you’ll never be able to catch up because you have to know those things in order to move to the next. Actually, it’s a very forward thinking kind of threshold concept type of student that I’m imagining, because they really don’t feel like they can get enough under their belt to move forward. So I think we learned,as teachers, we’ve learned a little bit about that. I really hope that all the students that we worked with in the writing program, I hope that a large percentage of them took to heart what we said about having real conversations with their teachers and other students, there was a lot of conversations in our “Designing your life course” and in other courses where I saw students were constantly talking about setting up peer networks, or in our roundup and kickoff activities and that kind of stuff. They were constantly talking about the need to do that. But they had no idea how to do it online in online classes. They knew how to do it online. So as soon as people like me said, “I don’t care how you set up your community use WhatsApp, use whatever,” then it all went crazy. So there’s also I think, an understanding that students can organize themselves better than we can, or at least we should try to negotiate a way to organize ourselves that’s okay with the teacher and it’s okay with the students. Because nobody wants me teaching a Twitter assignment, because I don’t understand it. Like I don’t know how it works. But you also have to let students organize themselves in the peer network so that it will survive. And not just with team-building things because you don’t know how to run Zoom. And so you just force everybody into a breakout room because you somehow think that somehow is the same as having them work together in groups in classrooms. So I think we’ve learned quite a bit about design strategies, or at least design thinking, even if nobody’s going to call it that, but me. Maybe there’s a few other people at the university that will call it that.

John: You mentioned spending some time at the beginning of class, focusing on metacognition and helping students learn how to learn more effectively, is that something that’s widely done in the institution? Or is that something that’s becoming more widely done in the institution?

Jonikka: I would say it’s becoming more widely done. It’s very much at the heart of our first year writing program: metacognition, reflection, the whole thing. It’s just very built into the DNA there. And then we have a first-year experience course, that was kind of built on some similar kinds of principles. But I think some of the feedback from our student survey was that students felt their courses were completely disorganized. And they didn’t know when anything was due, they didn’t know when they were supposed to be working on something, or how to find what it was they were supposed to be working on. In some sense, that’s one of the easier things for a faculty member to address. Because it could be like a beginning of the semester video explaining how your course is organized or whatever. In terms of sticky teaching problems, that’s not terribly sticky, you can see a path forward to figuring it out and to helping students with that. My hope is that we can help those faculty transfer their understanding of that situation to their understanding of how to teach a project for a course, or when they make a big assignment. If it’s a writing assignment, or any other kind of assignment, that they recognize that the same metacognitive moves would be helpful for students. So I think that that would be an exciting thing to see happen. I don’t think we’ve had enough conversations yet about the feedback from students, both what we heard through our survey, but also what faculty may have heard through their course evaluations, or just their own experiences. I went to faculty senate before the break, and I had a number of faculty, and they were really good teaching faculty, talking about how they had gone through the blueprinting process and they had been asked to do all these assignments and stuff for every single learning objective and things like that. And they realized that they had gone too far, that they had overwhelmed the students. So now they were gonna back off after that. So they’re engaging in some metacognition themselves, which is good, and I think the more that we can encourage that in faculty, and then help them make the connection between what they’re learning and how they’re applying what they’re learning to the next iteration of the course, to what their students go through. I know I spend a lot of time having those conversations with my own faculty in my college. And now I’ll often say to them, I’ll try to find a gentle way of saying it, but like, I’ll say, “Would you think that’s okay from your students?” And how would you go about doing that with your own students and think about that for yourself. That’s my hope.

Colin: We also had a very small pilot for students as learners and teachers that at least that Alyssa Cavazos ran out of our Center for Teaching Excellence. And it was only five teachers, I believe, It may have been six, and I was one of them. But the other four teachers were from history, philosophy, I think it was physics, may have been just math, I cannot remember the other one. But they have never had a student observe them officially in a class. And we all spent an entire semester with a student partner, basically doing metacognitive work. And it did a number on me, and I know how to do that work. I respect student voices and I want them with me. And so it was really fun for me. It changed the other four people’s lives. And so there’s at least four other people in four other colleges, because we spaced them out around the university, who worked with a upper-level student about their classes and redesigning it and thinking about student reactions on a daily basis. And I hope we can scale that up somehow in a way that isn’t completely uncomfortable, but a little uncomfortable. Because the good parts are the uncomfortable parts. The good parts were where the students asked like, “How do we tell the teachers what we really think?” And the teachers were like, “How do I tell the student that I don’t really care what they think?” …like, those things happened at the beginning. And once they got over them, the conversations that happened as designers as co-designers were fantastic and amazing. And it was with people that are resistant, they wanted to be in the project. But they were not. They did not go into it thinking they were completely open to what a non- major student would say about their teaching as an observer that had been trained to observe. I hope that projects like that continue and thrive. And people don’t just let it go because things go back to normal and they don’t have something driving them to think about how to make their classes work better. It’s probably up to people like me and Jonikka to make sure they keep asking these questions and don’t just let them drop, right?

Jonikka: Well, we’ve been asking, the Interim Provost here and I, have been asking on a regular basis, like what will next fall look like? What will we basically have learned that informs what next fall looks like? And I don’t think most faculty were ready, at least before the break to have those conversations. Everyone is completely exhausted, students are exhausted, faculty, staff, everyone was just exhausted. And I think it’s gonna be a long while before we ever restore ourselves to some sense of space and ability to look at and reflect on the things that have happened in a way that enables us to move forward in a more substantial way.

Rebecca: One of the things that has come up in conversations I’ve had with arts faculty and writing faculty, here anyways, is the processing of what’s happening in a pandemic. That sometimes happens through writing or making in some way, or also the want to escape from what’s happening in writing or making. [LAUGHTER]

Jonikka: Yeah.

Rebecca: And that complex dance that’s happening and different people need some different things. Can you talk a little bit about how faculty in your departments tried to balance some of those needs, concerns, wants?

Colin: We had one faculty member who started a journal writing, like, initiative right at the beginning of everything. And it wasn’t because of this. He had wanted to start it and he was going to retire. And he just wanted to give it one last stab to see if he could recruit some people. The students that joined that I know and the faculty said that it was incredibly insightful, and they wanted to talk about their writing, and they wanted to journal and talk about what was going on. So that was really great for him as a faculty member. I know that there had to be a shift for… I know that this may be a weird way to answer the question, but it felt like there was a shift from faculty always pointing students towards more…. I guess what you’d call more scholarly resources, like a path that… I use that word with air quotes around it, but you need to learn more and so you go off and you look and reread more. And I remember, we were having a meeting and I was like, “Why? It’s a literacy narrative.” And you’re freaking out, because your students are doing a literacy narrative. And the high school students just got sent home, and their teachers aren’t making them turn their cameras on and they’re not talking to them. And then in the college version of the class, your students are able to do the types of work in the field that you would normally have them do, because we’ve got a pretty crazy experiential component to our first-year writing courses. And I was like, “Dude, they live with their families, just have them do interviews. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel and just own the space that you’re around.” And I remember somebody else saying, “Yeah, it’s like, when my students don’t want to turn their cameras, I say, well describe the perfect space, it’s at least a reason to get you to be creative and think outside of the box,” or whatever. And so students started drawing their own ideal spaces for their Zoom things when they left their cameras off. So there, I think there was a lot of shifting and deconstructing of the boundaries between what you see as your life and what you see as the real world and what you see as school. Not everybody’s comfortable with that stuff, either. But I think people had to find their own outlet or their own break to a certain extent. I give my students my cell phone, and then I labeled them by the course and the semester so I can remember them. But I had tons of students texting me in the middle of doing things in class because things weren’t working, or somebody didn’t show up, or whatever, or they needed me to come into a group. When I told people I was doing that, the people that were having trouble managing people in multiple rooms that were kind of privatized, they’re like, “Oh, my God, that makes so much sense. I’ll just have them go on R emind and tell me when things go crazy, or tell me when it hits the fan or whatever.” And so all these people that think they know technology and how to communicate really well, they didn’t really know how to communicate really well in the new classroom environment. So I think they had to find a way to do that. So your personal chats with your teacher, those went crazy for a while, I think mine are still too crazy. People having jam bands, you know, after class, or I think we had a few departmental after hours cocktail parties or something. We had all kinds of weird ways of socializing with some of the groups. Not a ton, though. I think, from what at least the writing program teachers told me was what they really missed the most were the unexpected, spontaneous conversations they have with students and faculty, which you can’t replicate by having Zoom meetings where everybody learns the song and plays together. Like you can’t force the hallway conversation, which is why I always go in and like Zoom bomb Jonikka whenever she’s in an important meeting. She’s right across the hallway, and those people don’t laugh enough. But I’m the only guy at the university doing that, [LAUGHTER] like stand up comedy to try to break the fourth wall with people, because there’s so much investment in just getting through meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting. So I’m sure there’s more clowns at our university than just me. But there’s a small cohort of clowns and Jonikka knows all of them.

John: You mentioned some of the problems with engagement or with students making connections with other students. What techniques have people tried or will be trying this spring to help improve the development of more community in either asynchronous or remote synchronous instruction?

Colin: I think there’s a move in our program to have a version of teamwork or the idea that students develop an ability to do teamwork, or work together to finish a project and have different responsibilities. It’s a complicated definition. But I think people are moving away from longer collaborative projects, and they’re moving towards more, do the work in class in a small group, get something accomplished, present on it, and then rotate out. And then having students form their own communities for projects outside of it as support groups. So there’s more small team work in class that actually has a product attached to it. So I’ll give you an example. There’s a difference between having students get into a group to deconstruct a reading and then piece together an interpretation of a reading, made from five different groups working with different passages from the text. That’s a very different exercise in a face-to-face class than what they’re doing when they have students create a message from scratch, using some kind of social media outlet, using a pandemic context and trying to create a flyer that would get people’s attention to do some activity. And then to have that whole thing go from prototyping and ideation all the way to design and testing. That’s not something that I think the teachers knew how to do, or wanted to do to start with. So engagement wise, it probably would make a lot of teachers that I know mad to say it, but they really do need to feel like they’re entertained, because they’re enjoying what they’re doing. Not necessarily entertainment just for fun sake, it’s that there’s a felt sense that they need to enjoy what they’re doing, if that’s you being a clown, and they actually will engage with you and learn something, and they just use you as the magnet, that’s cool. But if it’s doing small projects that have a finish line to them and during the class, then that’s fine too. Or if it’s having your students teach the class, which is what I was doing, having different groups teach every week, so that it’s not just me that’s responsible for distributing knowledge, it’s more people doing knowledge. Jonikka too, would tell me this probably isn’t as widespread as I feel like it should be. But there’s a need, I think, for students to be the knowledge makers. And I think that there’s more evidence from what I’m seeing in my department that people let students talk through their ideas as they were developing and that that made students more engaged. It’s completely counterintuitive to a lot of our faculty, because they think that what they really want to see is what happens when the students finally get it. And I keep telling them over and over again, “No, you want to see the process, you want to be with them while they get it, you don’t really care that they get it because at that point, you have to move on to a new idea.” But I think they’re having to flip their own ideas about those “aha” moments, because the moments don’t really work anymore. The moments are just like, “Oh, I got it,” but then that person’s muted, and they’re off on their own direction. And so I think there’s a lot of us working with students to set them up in pairs or small groups, and then kind of coaching them on how to be with one another. That sounded really weird, but coaching them how to be with one another and work together. So that when they’re off on their own, they will have that as a habit to come back to when they don’t have you. And I’m sure that’s what we do in face-to-face classes as well. But it’s really, really different in an online, especially in a Zoom, environment. But in an asynchronous environment, I always said that being online was two and a half times as much work. But the amount of matchmaking of ideas that I had to do online through discussion lists that basically quote one person and pull them over and have them engage with another person in a conversation. That was my entire life at teaching for that last semester. It was just trying to manage a conversation and create a community of people who were basically posting and responding and then leaving… this, “here’s what I think. I’m out of here.” So I don’t think we’ve figured out the perfect strategies for any of that other than you have to listen to your students. And when they’re engaged, you have to immediately ask them, even if it’s very uncomfortable in class, “Why did you say that?” or “Why did you feel like that was really cool?” Like, “How did you come up with that?” like, there was a whole lot of asking students to expose how they came up with ideas and why they connected things that I did, that I always do a couple of times in a class in a meeting, but not as much as I needed to do it here. So it was really more like “That’s a great response”or whatever. “Talk us through how you came up with that.” So a whole lot more of asking students to teach the rest of everybody what they just did, which I guess is kind of engaging by example. It’s a kind of having the students be models instead of always expecting texts or pieces of writing or reading to be the models for the students when they leave your classroom. It’s a hell of a lot more work. I’m pretty sure that this is the way Jonnika and I always taught because I’m very comfortable with it. But teaching people to do it when you’ve been doing it for so long, is incredibly hard. And then telling them that it involves a whole lot of trust on your part for students, and then finding out that that’s not actually something that people have a lot of… that’s kind of hard too to cope with. There’s not as much trust as there needed to be or assumed trust that you can ask students to pick up the baton, or whatever the metaphor is, and take the lead on explaining an idea, I thought that was a whole lot more prevalent than it was. And so there’s a whole lot more of that that has to happen. A whole lot more of trusting of students, a lot more work in the first-year experience to try to get people to help students become leaders before they’re sophomores. I think there’s a lot of work to be done there, that can be really fun. Why are you smiling, J?,

Jonikka: I was just about to say, I’m going to be the Debbie Downer here. I don’t think we do this really well. I just think across the board, we’re not doing a good job at creating community, and making those connections for students. And like I said before, I really think it’s not new to the online environment so much, I don’t know that we were necessarily really great before. And I do think more people were able to do it in person than are able to do it online. And I do think that the technology is causing us some trouble. So down here in the valley, certainly not all students have access to Wi Fi, many of them are driving up to the Burger King parking lot, or driving up to our parking lot, or whatever. So even when faculty are making the choice to be in a synchronous environment, they’re not necessarily doing anything engaging in that environment. Actually, our son was in some synchronous classes last semester, and he would talk about how the teacher would call on the students to respond to something or answer a question or something. And then the student would have to unmute themselves and say, hold on a second, I’m with the customer, or whatever, because they were at work. And they were just listening to class. And so they at least did unmute and respond. But it’s very hard to imagine how you create a community out of that when you’re not able to take advantage of the moments when you’re in real time with one another. And lots of feedback from our survey about the black screens in Zoom, and how awful it felt to everybody and a lot of empathy on the students’ part for the faculty member. Like I cannot imagine what it must be like to try to teach to a screen full of black screens. So it was uncomfortable for them, uncomfortable for the faculty member. And so I think we need to do a lot better job of lifting up those faculty who have found those strategies that are working for them and to recognize when it’s people like Colin or some of the people who… really a lot of that engagement comes from charisma on the part of the faculty, you can’t replicate that with everyone. So what are those strategies that people are using? I’ve heard some people, it’s a different app that they’re using, or something like that. But the kind of things are available to everybody that are in Blackboard and things like that, you saw all these people move to using discussion boards, and now everybody hates discussion boards. Because it’s the same rote practice, write a couple, read a couple. respond to them, there are memes about it now. So students are making fun of it, and rightfully so. It can be difficult, and then you put the faculty member in the position of “Okay, now I either have to read them and treat them with the respect that they deserve or I just take it as you put in your time and you did your task and we’re done.” I don’t have any particular examples that I can share with you, which is terrible, and more probably a sign of me just not talking with enough faculty members. But I just worry that it’s not enough yet. And even as we move into post pandemic, there’s going to be more of a mix of online and different modalities. And so it’s not like the conversation stops now. I think it’s just maybe we’ll have a little more peace of mind to have those conversations as we move forward. But that engagement piece is absolutely critical. And I’m certain it’s why a lot of our persistence rates, fall to spring, are down and things like that. I don’t know how long students will have patience for it, I guess is what I’m saying.

Colin: I have one practical strategy that I remember. See, you were a Debbie Downer…

Jonikka: There you go.

Colin: …but I remember the positives, so…

Jonikka: OK..

Colin: That’s why we’re married. I think teachers need to see the time in class, they need to completely redesign how they imagine that… I think ours is an hour and 15 minutes for a normal class… and never unimagine the potential for when they go back to different modalities. And it’s not just synchronous meetings, or asynchronous meetings, or asynchronous work with occasional voluntary meetings and that kind of thing is that the work that happens in class should probably be social and it should be structured and designed around community instead of being designed around: “This is a list of outcomes that have to be done before the end of this class.” More like these are lists of prompts of things that we’re going to try to address. Because the thing that I think made a lot of difference with some of our faculties… I coached them on how to do a green room… and maybe everybody was doing this and I just was too busy to notice that it was a trend or something… but not to have time before class and not to worry about seeing people in the hallways because they weren’t there. They weren’t any hallways and not to join your class early. But to literally have 10 minutes of a green room time at the beginning of a class meeting where everybody is mingling and talking and checking in with each other. And then to have 10 minutes at the end of class where you basically do the same thing, and people head off or they don’t head off. And what you saw when you started doing that in your classes, or what we saw, was that the students were showing up because of that time, and they needed that time, and they needed a different kind of entry into the class. And we had to coach them, it wasn’t an easy thing, it wasn’t a normal thing, because it’s not like being on your friend’s chat room or something. It’s still weird and awkward, and someone who forces everybody to do icebreakers and games, unless that’s just their thing, that’s going to be also awkward, but to have the time to talk to each other as human beings, and it not be like creepy, was incredibly important, I think, to have built into the class, as a normal part of being in the class because there were no breaks. Students were just going from class to class work to work. I had students get pulled over in cars, while they were in my class, doing presentations, like all kinds of crazy stuff happened. But in my classes, at least, they knew each other’s names, and they knew how to contact each other within the first few days, because we were doing those meetings. Now, they all told their friends that Colin’s classes are easy, because he doesn’t teach the whole time. But yeah, I was teaching, it was an experiment in social engagement, or whatever. But it, of course, changed what I could do during class time. But I think it was important for me to build that in. And I don’t think I will ever remove it again from my other delivery and modalities. The discussion boards are a joke, unless they’re an extension of an actual discussion. So if you’re not teaching your students how to have the actual discussion, then discussion boards are just going to be habitual writing behavior, and nothing new is going to come out of them. And so I think you have to learn how to be with your students that way. It’s probably not something a lot of people would be comfortable with, but I think it’s an actual practical strategy. You have to bookend your classes with at least the opportunity for engagement, where it’s low risk, but high impact talking with your students. Not in a conference, just talking with people.

Rebecca: I think that’s one of the key things that’s missing in online learning for students is just their general social community. So maybe we weren’t doing that in a physical classroom previously, but they had their actual social circles happening, they were able to connect with other students, and that existed for them. But when everyone’s in online classes, that part of the college experience is very difficult to facilitate. So that then became an academic part of college as opposed to just the social piece, I had the same kind of experience in my class, when there was that social time or whatever, they bonded a lot, and it helped a lot.

Colin: Yeah, I remember one student telling me, are we ever gonna stop changing group? And I was like, “Dude, all you have to do is say it. We’ll stop changing groups… keep the same group for two weeks. Two class meetings later, “Could you please get me out of this group, I cannot stay working with these people anymore.” [LAUGHTER] And I was like, “So I don’t know. What is the silver bullet?” They’re like, “Just go back to what you were doing before. I thought I wanted the same people. But my God, I do not want the same people.” But that whole class had a conversation about that and had a big joke about it, like who’s not going to be put in which group and they’re just like, “He’s gonna have to randomize everything, because if we start talking about who we like, and don’t like, [LAUGHTER] it’s gonna get really awkward really quick.” But you can have that conversation when the group has developed that sense of community. If it’s just me assigning names to stuff, then you’re not really having a conversation about why you’re doing it.

Rebecca: And each group is a bit different. I had students that asked for two different persistent groups that they just rotated between.

Colin: Yeah, now, that’s metacognition.

Rebecca: Ok. We can do that. I’m not sure how that’s gonna work. [LAUGHTER] But we can try that. And by the end, I think they thought, “Well, okay, that was an interesting experiment. Maybe we don’t want to do that again in the future, but you know…”

Colin: That’s great. I’ve got my aAclub, and I’ve got my B club, but I really can’t handle you guys today, so I’ll go with the B club.

Rebecca: Well, they had the project team, and then they had a different circle or whatever.

Colin: That’s great.

Rebecca: I could make it happen, so I did.

John: How have students on your campus responded to all the changes they’ve seen in instruction resulting from COVID.

Jonikka: I think one of the really interesting things that came out of our survey, which I’m curious to hear if any of you heard anything on your campuses, is that students consistently said they had more work to do in the fall than they had ever had to do before. And so every time I get a chance, I try to engage somebody in a conversation about this, because I think there are so many different complex things going on. I think, in many cases, students literally were doing more things than they did before. And part of that was a consequence of the online environment. So rather than having a discussion in class, they were having to write responses to the same kinds of questions that faculty might ask in class or something like that. So I think there’s actually more of that going on. And I think that faculty, through a lot of professional development things that we did were introduced to all these gadgets and tools and things, and then they started using them. And so they weren’t necessarily doing similar kinds of things in the face-to-face environment. Students when they’re going to class face to face… I think there was a lot of activity and a lot of work that was going on in class that they didn’t classify as work. It didn’t feel like work. But now because they’re having to do it while they’re at home or someplace else, now it’s homework or whatever. I read a little tidbit in The Chronicle at one point in the fall, it was kind of a national phenomenon that other people were reporting the same kind of thing. But I’m just really curious if we ended up having any deeper conversations about this, because I think it’s really easy for faculty to say, “Well, no I’m not” and for faculty to say, “Well, yes, you are.” but to have the conversations about what that lived experience really is like, and to be able to negotiate. Some of those faculty here did who said, “Yeah, I really did go too far. So now I have to rethink what is the most important things,” and maybe I’m hoping it leads to some like projects that are scaffolded, rather than 1000 little things that they asked students do, that are disconnected.

Colin: …or they’ll be a revolutionary cry for passive learning again, from students?

Jonikka: Well, we did hear a lot of that, we did hear some of that, like, just give me a few tests. And that’s it. I was like, “Oh, no, that’s not good, either.” [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve been hearing a lot of the same thing. And I think the surveys done in the SUNY system are affirming that as well, that students do feel like they’re doing more work. And partly, I think it’s because in the past, when there was a lot more passive learning, faculty would give students readings to do and then assume that they had read them. And now as more people have moved to a flipped learning environment, they’re giving them what they used to give as a lecture, except now they’re adding some questions and some quizzes to it. Where now students are graded on having done it. So now they actually have to do the readings…

Jonikka: Right.

John: …in ways that might not always have happened in the past. I think some of it is faculty, were often assuming that students were doing all this work, because that’s what the faculty had done when they were students, forgetting that they were not a random sample of the student population. So I think there’s a little bit of recalibration, perhaps, that needs to take place. {LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, I think too the class time that you’re mentioning too Jonikka was definitely something that I experienced, I teach in a studio program. So our class time, if we’re in synchronous time, we’re in class for six hours a week. And then students are used to having homework. So workload in general, these students are used to work, they’re used to doing a lot, but I didn’t have so much complaints about too much work. But I think it’s too much independent work, because I was teaching, partly synchronous and partly asynchronous. And I am in the spring teaching synchronously and setting a time in class to do the same kinds of exercises and things that I would have done if we were face to face because I just needed scheduled time to do the activities and some of that guidance. And they were really asking for that. We started off with meeting only once a week at the beginning of the week, which they liked. And then they kept asking for a little more and a little more and a little more. And next thing, you know, I was pretty much teaching synchronously. [LAUGHTER] You know, not completely, but it got pretty close by the end of the semester, because it was helping them to have some structured time because they weren’t managing their own time. Although I would say this is going to take this amount of time, you’re used to being in class for six hours, we’re only in class for two, you have that four hours, that’s still class time, that’s not even homework time. So it feels like it’s a lot, especially if they’re not used to it.

Colin: There’s probably a whole book to be written about timely motivation too, because listening to what you were saying, part of the issue I noticed was that students who are usually coming to face-to-face classes, they will plan to freak out because they haven’t done what they needed to do. And they will come to you either at the beginning of class or during group time, or at the end of class. That doesn’t work in Zoom. I remember having conversations during the end of the semester about when you go next semester, talk to your teachers the minute you think there might be something wrong, so that you can figure out how you’re going to talk to them. Because I think you all need to learn how to talk to people more quickly. Because you’re waiting, and thinking there’s going to be a moment and then you look up and there’s nobody around you. Nobody in your family understands what you’re going through with those classes, your friends are freaking out and don’t want to show weakness, or they’re already messed up or upset or passed you. And so there’s no timely motivation. It’s just it happens to happen. But it doesn’t happen to happen online learning, at least it doesn’t in my experience. And so I don’t know that we can build those things in. But I think you could make a whole career out of trying to figure out how to recognize when you need to be timely and motivated for a student and not be really creepy about it. Like “Oh, tell me what’s going on.”

Rebecca: And we all know that those moments aren’t happening because we would have those moments with colleagues and they don’t happen in meetings now either.

Colin: Yeah. Okay, everybody take a beat. We need to talk about what’s going on with Jonikka. [LAUGHTER] That’s only gonna happen in my meetings.

John: And there’s a lot of stressors caused by the pandemic and I think that’s a part of it. People are feeling overwhelmed. It’s harder to stay focused. There’s so many things going on in the world that are very distracting and concerning to everybody.

Jonikka: Yes.

Colin: I’m distracted by the distractions.

Rebecca: We always end by asking what’s next? …which always seems really big as we’ve had these episodes during the pandemic, but what’s next?

Colin: I need season nine of the British baking show to come out very very soon…

Jonikka: That’s true.

Colin: …for my own wellness and sanity. [LAUGHTER]

Jonikka: I think for us, one of the big things that’s next is that we’re taking advantage of some of the CARES dollars and things like that, that are coming in to support faculty professional development on a scale that I have never seen before. So we’re trying to do something, this kind of series that is going to be focused on faculty teaching first-year students. And so really taking a different approach than we’ve ever taken before. And really focusing, I think, in some ways more on the affective pieces, like, “Who are these students? What has their experience been?” Well, honestly, that’s just good faculty development, but we’ve not really done it in those kinds of ways necessarily before. What are their experiences? How do they learn? And bringing students into that conversation too like, “What did it feel like to be part of classes that operated in these kinds of ways?” And so really getting to the heart of where we started this really just about the teaching and learning piece, and what does it mean? And what shared values and shared understandings of what it means for students to be actively learning in a class. And what does that look like different? Why is it so special and important for first-year students. So that’s what we spent at least the last 24 hours, feverishly,trting to figure out what we can do for that, and how we can build those student observers and feedback givers into that process as well. And try to get at least 60% of the faculty who teach the majority of their workload with freshmen to do that. So again, that’s something that Colln and I probably have wanted to do for 20 years. We could have done it any of those years. But it means something different in this context now, where we’ve got our next freshmen class is going to have had an entire year and a half of their four years of high school be almost nothing. I mean, we’ve got one 21 year old and one almost 16 year old. And so we’re kind of seeing it firsthand what’s going on with these students and what it means for them to learn and be in school. And so we’re gonna have to reckon with that as faculty. And so I think now’s a good time to have those kind of real fundamental conversations.

Colin: Even though I ramble a lot and talk all the time and, as Jonikka told me today in another conversation, for somebody who loves to talk about all the intricacies of things, there are things in my life that I absolutely refuse to talk about. I’m not the most comfortable social person in the world, especially when it comes to difficult conversations that affect things like equity and diversity and how people’s identity are tied to the teaching. And I can make a joke, and I can point out something insightful, and then kind of run away while everybody’s laughing. But I think this last year has taught me, kind of along the lines of Jonikka with the affective stuff and thinking about students that way, is that I’m going to have to be a actual active sponsor of difficult conversations, and try to get other people to do that with me, because a lot of the things that have been happening in different groups I belong to, it really is all about sponsorship, it really is like all of the conversations are about listening to people and trying to have a conversation when people need to have it instead of figuring out how to put it off until a time when you can deal with it. And at least this last year has taught me that you can’t put any of those things off, because in 24 hours, somebody could lose it, or somebody could solve the problem and move on to the next bit. And so I literally was thinking I better remember to tell you guys to have a good weekend when we’re done. And then and then Rebecca was talking, I was like, dude, I think it’s Tuesday. It’s Tuesday talk time Colin, it’s not Friday yet. [LAUGHTER] So I don’t have any sense of time anymore. But I think that might be a good thing. I wasn’t joking about the timeliness thing. I think Jonikka and me and other people that are in positions where we’re responsible for trainings, I think we have to make sure that part of those trainings, deals with people’s need to have conversations they really don’t want to have. So if there’s a conversation about merit, and how we’re going to figure out merit one year, maybe we should have a conversation about why you deserve a raise, and what’s good teaching, instead of worrying about counting things. And if we’re going to talk about shoving something to do with equity into a training session, why aren’t we talking about having it as part of every session? And what would that change? And who needs to deliver it? And so I think there’s a lot of challenging conversations about student perspective, about equity and diversity, and about what good teaching is, or not even that, I think it’s about what do we really want to see happen in a classroom that is successful? And what does that mean for the teacher and it’s okay for it to be something different for the teacher than for the student. That’s actually why it’s interesting, because they’re both getting different things out of it. But I don’t think we have the language for learning from each other. I don’t think we’re that advanced in having a language about how that happens between teachers and students. I know that there are experts that have affective terminological screens and they understand how to deal with the way the brain works. I don’t think people that are good at teaching and people that are good at psychoanalyzing have really figured out how to mesh the thing so that it works for everybody in a way that you can have that conversation. So when I say we need to train our students how to talk to their teachers, I actually mean that. I don’t mean we need to train them how to write an email that doesn’t offend their teachers, because it’s grammatically correct. I mean, literally, I wish I would have figured this out five years ago and taught Ian, our 21 year old, how to start a conversation with one of his college teachers, and how to think about how to start it differently with one than the other. Somebody should have taught him that in a writing class, probably one of my teachers, but I should have taught him that too. As soon as I realized that he needed to have that conversation with somebody else instead of with me. So I think there’s a whole lot of react to the student in front of you and just fix it right there. And not as much training in the listening part and the having the difficult conversation. And having a moment where you can trust each other, I think we’ve got a whole hell of a lot of work to do in that area. So that’ll be fun for the next 15 years of our life… be an affective czar of an institution. There’s not enough going on, right?

John: And the pandemic and the shift online has exposed so much inequities that our students are dealing with. And that’s particularly true for first-generation students. And that’s something I think that all colleges are now being forced to face in a way that they had chosen to ignore for a very long time.

Rebecca: So yes, many difficult conversations in the future [LAUGHTER]. Good call. Colin. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. This was really interesting, and I think has a lot of important things to think about, not just into the spring, but into the fall and many future semesters.

Jonikka: Thank you.

Colin: Thank you guys for talking with us and listening to us.

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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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168. Synchronous Online Learning

The pandemic forced many faculty to experiment in different modalities in 2020. In this episode, we reflect on our own teaching experiences with synchronous online courses this year.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: As we approach the end of a really challenging year, we’d like to thank all of our guests who provided so much help and support to us and all of our listeners, and we’d like to thank you, our listeners, for hanging in there with us. We’ve all learned a lot in 2020 and we’re looking forward to a chance to apply what we’ve learned in circumstances in which there are fewer external threats.

…and now we return to our regularly scheduled podcast.

The pandemic forced many faculty to experiment in different modalities in 2020. In this episode, we reflect on our own teaching experiences with synchronous online courses this year.

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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: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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Rebecca: Over the past few months, we’ve talked a lot about the pandemic and ways to adjust our teaching. And we’ve talked a lot about online learning, but we haven’t really focused on synchronous learning. John and I both taught synchronously this semester. So we decided that in this episode, we would focus a little bit more on synchronous learning and what we’ve learned about it in our own experiments in our classes.

John: Our teas today are:

Rebecca: I have Scottish breakfast once again.

John: …and I have a blend of spearmint and peppermint tea.

Rebecca: That sounds much healthier than my choice.

John: It’s not my first tea of the day.

Rebecca: This is not mine, either.

John: This is my first herbal tea of the day.

Rebecca: This is my second pot of the day. [LAUGHTER]

John: So, Rebecca, what classes were you teaching this fall?

Rebecca: I was teaching two design classes that are smaller. So I had one web design course that was stacked. So, it had beginning, intermediate and advanced students in it, 25 students, and we met synchronously, but also had asynchronous classes, it’s considered a studio course. So for a three credit course, we have six hours of class time, and three hours of outside work, which is a different balance than maybe other folks. And then the other class I was teaching was a special topics design course, which was smaller, it was about 10 students. And that class was also synchronous, but it was a project-based class, and we worked on two community design projects: one for a project called Vote Oswego, which was a get-out-the-vote initiative on campus, and the second is a project called “Recollection,” which is a storytelling project with adult care facilities.

John: And we do have an earlier podcast on an earlier iteration of Vote Oswego. So we’ll include a link to that in the show notes.

Rebecca: So John, what kind of classes are you teaching? We obviously don’t teach the same thing.

John: I was teaching two classes this fall. One was a large synchronous session with 288 students. And the other was a fully asynchronous section with 60 students this semester,

Rebecca: At what level were the students in both of your classes?

John: These were both introductory economics classes. So most students in the class were freshmen, and it was their first economics course.

Rebecca: So, your classes are much larger than mine, you’re teaching much more younger students or newer students, and my classes are smaller, project-based, and usually junior or senior students.

John: Yes. And there’s certainly some differences in the disciplines as well.

Rebecca: No, that they’re the same. [LAUGHTER]

John: Why did you choose a synchronous mode of delivery rather than an asynchronous mode, or a face-to-face option this fall?

Rebecca: So I chose not to do face-to-face delivery for my own health reasons, I chose to not be on campus for my own safety, because I have a chronic illness. So I chose specifically to have strong synchronous components, because a lot of our students are used to working in a studio together and having a community around each other and kind of feed off of each other’s work and work collaboratively. And I wanted, because of the classes I was teaching, to continue to have collaboration as a key part of my class. And I was really concerned that if I didn’t have a strong synchronous component, my students wouldn’t be able to effectively collaborate with each other, because there would be too much scheduling issues and what have you. So it’s a little bit of a carryover from the way that I would run my classes in person in that I give a lot of class time to project-based learning and team-based work and do a lot of lectures and things like that asynchronously in like a flipped classroom style. How about you, John?

John: Basically, I tried to preserve something as close as possible to what was originally scheduled or what was originally planned. And my large class is typically about 400 to 420 students, and I just couldn’t imagine taking that class and doing it in a completely asynchronous manner, because when I teach a class asynchronously, I give students lots of individual feedback, and it would be really challenging providing individual feedback to several hundred students. I just didn’t really have the time to do it in that sort of mode. So I thought it was better to work in a mode where I could give students feedback in a group setting using some interactive tools, where they’re all getting feedback at once. It was the only way I could see handling a group that large. If I was trying to do it as an online class, it would be effectively more in the form of a MOOC with very little interaction, either among the students or between me and the students.

Rebecca: One of the things that we both talked about before we started recording was how we both used a flipped classroom model to help with our synchronous session. So can you talk a little bit about how you did that and what students were doing outside of class.

John: This is actually, in many ways, similar to what I had done in a face-to-face class. Before each class, students would have some readings to work through. And I use the Lumen Learning Waymaker package, which is basically taking materials from a textbook, combining it with interactive multimedia, where they got to shift demand and supply curves and other curves around and see how they responded when they change parameters. And they read a bit in that online text and then they would work through some problems on it where they were allowed multiple attempts at those problems. I also created some videos with embedded questions that were at a somewhat higher level than the textbook readings, which was a little bit more challenging. And they were given unlimited attempts to work through those videos with the questions. And they also, outside of class, participated in discussion boards, where I asked them to relate what they were learning to things in the world around them, in their own lives and their own experiences.

Rebecca: …nice little inclusive teaching practice right there, right? …connecting students with their experience and making it relevant to them.

John: Right, because we know that students learn things most effectively when it has some salience, when they see the relevance to their life.

Rebecca: And the waymaker package, if I remember correctly, had some quizzing and stuff associated with that, and unlimited attempts, a version of retrieval practice there.

John: It’s a mix of things with unlimited attempts and limited attempts. So, the microeconomics Waymaker package is designed, and all of their Waymaker packages, for that matter, are designed, is that they start with a list of broad learning objectives. And they break it down at each module level to sub objectives. And they break those down into sub modules. So, in what would have been the equivalent of a chapter of a textbook, there’s usually two to four sub modules on particular aspects of that. And students work through that. And embedded in it, they have some review questions, some practice questions. And those they can take an unlimited number of times at any point in the course. Once they complete the module, they have a module quiz where they are limited to only two attempts at it. But they’re getting feedback on what they did well. And what they didn’t do well. It’s automatically color coded to indicate whether they mastered the material in one of the blocks of content in there. And then, if they take the module quiz, it will give them feedback on what areas they did well, and what areas they need to work at more. And they’re being directed back to the areas that they need to review. And there, they do have unlimited practice opportunities. And the other thing I did is I created my own videos that focused primarily on the topics that students generally find the most challenging. And in economics, that’s generally with either applications involving math or involving graphs. It was one module a week, and I would take the topics that I know, from past experience, they were likely to have the most problems with, I’d create my own videos with that. And I was using PlayPosit, which allows you to embed questions in there. Most of those videos I created were between five and 12 minutes in length. They would watch the videos and answer questions as they were going. And if they got one of the questions wrong, they could go back and replay that portion of the video and then try it again. And they were given unlimited opportunities for that.

Rebecca: I think you mentioned students really loved those opportunities.

John: At the end of the class, I gave them a Jamboard, which I know is something you’ve used more regularly, asking them what worked well. And there was very much universal agreement on the PlayPosit, as well as on the Waymaker aspects of the course. They really liked the fact that there were practice activities embedded right in their textbook, and that they could go back and try things over and over again until they mastered it. And it was giving them feedback on whether they had, in fact, attained mastery at every step. And it was a nice visual indication of what they’ve learned and what they still needed to work on more.

Rebecca: Excellent.

John: What did you do in your asynchronous components of your class?

Rebecca: Well, the balance of my classes, as I mentioned before, is a little wonky in that we’re supposed to spend more time in class and less time out. So asynchronously, I did a lot of independent stuff that students were not necessarily doing collaboratively. So this is where I had lecture videos that are recorded that were about the topics that they were going to be working on or introduce the component of the project that they were going to be doing. And then they also were completing things like LinkedIn Learning tutorials. And we also have access to D-Q University, which is a set of tutorials for accessibility, and teaches accessibility. So I took advantage of that package as well. And largely they were completing those kinds of tutorials, both of those have exercise files and that kind of thing that they can follow along with. They get little certificates. When they’re done completing there’s little quiz questions and stuff. So they were doing a lot of that kind of work asynchronously. They were also using Slack to communicate with their teams for independent things that they were working on that they needed to communicate out to teams when they were working on projects together. And I also use Slack as a place to have discussion. So like you, I had discussion questions that tried to make what we were talking about relevant. We were exploring design, specifically like web design and how they interacted as a consumer versus how they would interact as a maker and did a lot of observational studies. We also did some discussion boards that were really about design activities and things that got students off the computer. So they were just documenting what they did off-screen, offline. So things like listening to a podcast so that they didn’t have to be staring at a screen and what their takeaways were. They attended virtual conferences, which I guess was still on-screen, and did some sketching, like paper prototyping and some other methods that we like to encourage our students to do, just to kind of help balance the screen time a little bit for students. So that’s largely what they were doing asynchronously.

John: Were you having them submit some copies of that work in some way, or were they just reflecting on the work that they had done?

Rebecca: The little non screen activities were documented in a discussion, essentially, that we were holding on Slack, and then tutorials and things, they were just submitting their completed certificates. And so I broke down those LinkedIn Learning courses and things over multiple weeks. So they didn’t really submit those certificates until they were completed. But they were doing a little bit by little bit, but if they didn’t do the tutorials, they wouldn’t be able to do the projects or the actual work that we were doing of the class. So it was pretty important that they were doing those components outside of class.

John: Once your students were in class, what did you have them do in a typical class session?

Rebecca: The two classes I was teaching I handled a bit differently because of just the sheer volume of students in the bigger class, which was 25 students that were working on projects. They were working on collaborative projects, in teams of three, for the most part. And so what we would often do is show-and-tell’s or critiques in small groups. So let’s say there was two or three teams together that we would do a little critique with in a breakout room, while other teams were meeting and collaborating. We would also do things like come together to answer questions about things that they were working on, troubleshoot or whatever, and then go work on projects in breakouts for a bit. And then we’ll come back at a scheduled time. I also did one-on-one meetings with students during class time. So I’d set up things like a quiet work breakout room or the chatty breakout room. And students would pick the place that they wanted to go while they were working on projects. And then I would meet with them individually for critique, and often a lot of code troubleshooting is a lot of what I spend synchronous time doing. And students sometimes met with my TA to do the same thing, and with our small groups. I also did a lot of design challenges. And students really liked those and would like to do more to hold them accountable for the kind of material that they were learning outside of class or being introduced to outside of class in a low-stakes environment to test it out with some peers and troubleshoot. So I would pose a little design problem. And then they’d work in a small group to work on that problem in a very tight amount of time. They might spend 30 minutes… my classes are three hours long… or an hour, and then we’d come back and show them off or talk about different things. And I tried to make those design challenges fun and entertaining. So one of the first things we did, which worked really well to start gelling their teams that they were with the whole semester was designing an emoji for Slack that they used for their team. And they loved that assignment. It was partly about working at a small size, and so it was tied to some of the curriculum that we were doing, but it was fun. So they did that in a small team and then had to implement it. Later on in the semester, we did things like a 404 error page for their projects, which were just kind of entertaining. We tried to make them amusing, so that if you landed on a page, it was a good user experience. So things that maybe wouldn’t typically work on in one of my classes that were a little bit more fun, but really were emphasizing the technical and conceptual things that we were working on. The other thing that we use synchronous time for is I took advantage of our virtual platform, and I brought in alumni multiple times, and local designers multiple times and did little Q and A’s with them. Not every week, but every few weeks, or every couple weeks, I would bring in a designer for a 30-minute session. They’d introduce their work. And then students did a Q&A with them, which students really loved. And it broke up our time a bit and really gave them something special that maybe we didn’t always do in a face-to-face class that made the synchronous environment kind of special.

John: Excellent. That is a nice opportunity provided by Zoom that actually could work in the classroom too. But I think many of us just hadn’t really considered it so much. It doesn’t really matter where you are when you’re teaching in this sort of synchronous environment. So it’s very easy to bring in guest speakers and it’s something we’ve probably should have been doing more of in the past, but I think many of us will be doing more in the future.

Rebecca: So John, how did you use your synchronous time?

John: I had told students before each class session, what specific topics we’d be working on. And then most of the class time was spent asking him a series of problems of progressively higher levels of challenge. I basically adopted Eric Mazur’s clicker strategy of trying to find challenging questions where roughly half the class will get it wrong the first time and then letting them meet (in this case, I had the meet in breakout rooms), discussing it and coming back and voting again on it. And generally, you’d see a fairly significant increase in the performance after they’ve had that chance to engage in peer discussion. And that’s where a lot of the learning seems to happen when clickers are being used. I used iClicker. The only difference is students could not use a physical radio frequency clicker because they have a range of a couple 100 meters and students were spread out all over the world, I had one student in Egypt, I had students in South America and students spread throughout the country this time. So they needed to use either their laptop or a mobile device in order to do that. We discussed it as a whole class after they come back from the breakout rooms. And then I’d asked them to explain their choices. I generally have them use chat, and then I’d go through and correct any misperceptions they’d have. And I try to guide them to the correct answer by asking them questions, and letting them see for themselves why some of the answers were right, and some of them were wrong. And generally, that’s how we spent many of our classes. Initially, I was also using Kahoot! from time to time. They enjoyed Kahoot!, but I noticed a bit of a drop off when we were doing the Kahoot! sessions, because those were not graded. And with the clicker questions, they were being graded, and that tended to receive a somewhat higher level of interest. It was very low stakes, they got a certain number of points for an incorrect answer on either attempt, and they got a bit more points when they answered the question correctly. And initially, I was giving him three points for an incorrect answer, and five for a correct one. And they asked it perhaps that could be bumped up, because some of the questions were so challenging. And I did raise it. So they ended up getting four points for any answer, and five points for a correct answer. So it is extremely low stakes. So I tried to do a lot of retrieval practice in the class, where it started from essentially no stakes with the embedded questions in the reading, then it ramped up to in class applications of this, where they still get 80%, even if they got it wrong, but they had another chance to get it correct. And then they took that module quiz, and even there, they had two attempts at it. So if they made mistakes, they had lots of resources they could go back to and work on it. So I tried to set it up and provide them with many pathways to attain mastery of the content, and to encourage a growth mindset and to encourage them to recognize that people make mistakes when they’re learning and that there’s a lot of benefit from having those mistakes as part of your learning process. There’s a lot of research that shows that we learn things much more deepl if we get them wrong, when we first try it, we’re much more likely to remember it later on, then if we happen to get it correct, initially. In that case, we’re much more likely to forget it a bit later. And that was a bit of a challenge for students. But I think they eventually appreciated the fact that everything was fairly low stakes.

Rebecca: I think I’m seeing some themes in the things that, although we’re teaching very different classes in very different contexts, there’s some real big themes about how we’re using our synchronous time, and even how we’re using our asynchronous time. And so there’s an emphasis on peer interaction and establishing those peer networks, really enforcing or reinforcing things and dealing with muddy points. And then also just providing the encouragement and support like that low-stakes environment or trying to foster a growth mindset. So in my classes, I did the same thing. I was doing peer group work and trying to really get them to collaborate and troubleshoot together and they love that that… that was really valuable. I spent time doing live demos and troubleshooting, when there was a really troublesome technical component or something that they were trying to do that a lot of them were having trouble with, that they could ask me live questions. So that same muddy point kind of thing that you were getting to in what you were discussing. And then, finally, the growth mindset that you started bringing up, I’d also tried to do and, although I didn’t have a lot of low-stakes testing, or something like that, I set my projects up so they were done in sprints. So a long full-semester project was broken into multiple two-week sprints, where they would work on something, get feedback, and then could revisit whatever they did, and then add a new component to it. And so I did that throughout the whole semester. So there was a bit of retrieval practice, a bit of spaced practice in there, and certainly some fostering a growth mindset and the idea that you make mistakes and that’s how you learn. And I spent a lot of time… I don’t know if you experienced this too, John… but I experienced a lot of time in synchronous and saying like, “You can do this. It’ll be okay. And this is how the learning experience works.”

John: And I did have to do a lot of that, especially in the first few weeks of the semester, because they were not used to a flipped class environment. And they were not used to this notion of making mistakes and learning from mistakes as part of your learning process. Because most of them have come up through their elementary and secondary school system thinking that they need to memorize some things and reproduce it on exams. And they do well if they get high scores, and they don’t make mistakes. And that’s just not how we learn in general. And it was important, I think, to help remind them of that. Another aspect of the flipped class environment that we’re both using is that we let students learn some of the basic skills, the easy things that they can learn pretty easily on their own, from other resources. And we’re trying to focus our class time using essentially a just-in-time teaching approach where you focus on the things that students always have trouble. In a traditional classroom environment, what normally happens is students will learn the easy stuff in class where faculty will lecture them on basic definitions and basic concepts. And then it all makes a lot of sense until students try to apply it. And they try to apply it typically in assignments outside of class, or in high-stakes exams. And it’s much more productive if the students use the time outside of class to master those basic concepts. And then we hold them accountable for having done that somehow in class. And then we give them assistance on the things that they find challenging when they need it. Not after they’ve had that experience of a more high-stakes assessment in some way.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think what I found or that students really shared with me that was something that they really appreciated was that there was a lot of structured time to work on those difficult problems in class. This is true of my face-to-face classes too, but even maybe more so in this online environment where students were having a really hard time managing their time. I would allow time to work on a project during class… it was scheduled, but then there was a check in point later on in the day. You wouldn’t want to spend three hours staring at a screen on Zoom, like this makes no sense. So I certainly did not do that. And I don’t want anyone to think that I did that. But, I would do things like “Okay, we’re going to check in at 9:30. And then we’re going to do a little activity together. And then you’re going to have some work time to work on X. And then we’re going to come back at 11. And you’re going to show me what you did. And then we’re going to have a little discussion or do another little activity, and then we’re gonna come back again at 12.” And we would have a schedule where there was time to kind of come back. What I found is, over time, students often wouldn’t actually get off of Zoom. They would just turn their cameras off and their microphones off. And I would do the same if it was like a work time. And then when we all came back on, a lot of students would turn the media back on. That said, I, of course did not require that depending on where students were, I certainly had students that were in environments where they couldn’t turn their cameras on, or had really poor internet connections, we adjusted as necessary there, and we had a way to communicate in a much more low-tech fashion using Slack during class time. So if something happened with someone’s internet connection, or whatever, they could still stay connected with us and what we’re doing.

John: How did you assess student learning in your class?

Rebecca: My classes are all project based. So the majority of grades are built on projects, not entirely, we had discussion boards, and I had some collaboration things that they were doing, and they were evaluated on those things as well. But projects were the significant piece of the puzzle. And the way that I graded them was really just providing feedback about the kinds of things I was going to ultimately grade very regularly throughout the semester. So every couple of weeks, they were getting feedback on their code for my web class, for example, feedback on their design, feedback on their writing, not a specific grade, necessarily, but feedback on all of those elements that were going to go into the final project. And then the ability to revise all of those again and again and again and continue to get feedback on those.

John: Did you have your students engaged in any reflective tasks?

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s a really great question, John. I had reflection built in two ways. So at the end of each sprint, or kind of module in my class, they were working on two projects at the same time throughout the semester, so they’d work kind of two weeks on one project, two weeks on the next project and cycle back… that was so that I had time to give them feedback regularly. So that was part of my structure. But at the end of one of those modules, I had a reflection activity that I implemented using a Google form. So a few different prompts to think about what they got out of that sprint, goals for their next sprint, that kind of thing. And then I also had some big group reflections at different moments during the semester, I had one at the beginning, and a couple in the middle and one at the end. And I use Jamboard for that, which is a Google suite tool that has sticky notes, and is the same kind of way that you might brainstorm. So I use it as a way to collect reflections in sticky note form, essentially, virtually. And I would have a reflection question for folks to respond to or a couple of different boards with different kinds of questions. In the beginning, we did something called “hopes and fears,” which is something I’ve talked about before… setting up the class like, what are they hopeful that they’re going to get out of a collaborative project? What are they scared about? We find out that like, all the teams have the same hopes and fears. During the middle of the semester, what are some of the big takeaways that you’ve had? What are some things that you want to work on? What are some things that you’d like to see changed about the class and various themes bubble up on that. And then at the end of the semester, I asked questions like, “What was your biggest takeaway? What was the thing you were surprised that you learned? What is one recommendation of something you would change in this semester?” and “What is something that you want to continue learning?” and I got really useful feedback on what to change about the class but also, some really great themes bubbled up across the class, which really results in like kind of three or four things for each of those questions, which was a nice way to wrap up the end of the class and summarize for students after they completed that task. And one thing that I like about the Jamboard is that it actually ends up being anonymous. You can see people while they’re working on it, but it doesn’t keep a name with a sticky, ultimately.

John: So you can see who’s active in the board, but you don’t see who is writing which note.

Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. So that worked really well for me. How about you, John, were you able to build in reflection? I know you have such a big class. So it can be tricky.

John: I wasn’t able to do as much of that with my large section. But I did have them do that, to some extent in their discussions. For one discussion forum in both classes, I had them use a tool called Packback, which uses artificial intelligence to give students some feedback as they’re writing their prompts. And each week, students had to post a question related to that week’s material and they had to respond to at least a couple other people. But one of the nice things about Packback is it will check the cognitive level of the posts, it will give them some feedback in terms of grammar, it will also do a little bit of checking to see if the material has previously been posted. And it gives students some feedback, encouraging them to say more than “I agree.” And it also encourages them to document sources and to provide resources or references for the arguments they provide. And they get a score on that. So it takes a lot of the evaluation of that away. And so I monitored all of that. But it was something that seemed to function pretty well, just by the interaction between the users and that system. I haven’t really mentioned much about what I did in my online class. My online class uses many of the tools, but obviously, I couldn’t do synchronous, because that class is fully asynchronous. I couldn’t do the same type of instruction. But I had students do two other things in that class that provided opportunities for reflection, one of which was I had them work in a metacognitive cafe, low-stakes discussion forum, where they reflected on what they were learning and the learning process. And that gave them another way of making connections to their learning and reflecting on how well they were learning materials and what barriers they were facing, and also sharing effective learning strategies with each other. They were given some readings each week, generally on research-based learning practices as a primer for many of those discussions… others, they were just reflecting on what they’ve learned and how it might be useful in their life to tie it back to themselves. But the other thing I had students do is work on two podcast projects in that class. And in those they were taking what they were learning and making reflections about how that connected to the world around them. Many of them ended up being related to COVID and pandemics, but they were making some really good connections, and they were getting a chance to see how the material they were learning had some relevance in their own lives. And a lot of that came out in some of the things they were discussing in their podcasts. And they also did use Jamboard once at the very end of the term. But I also use Google forms a few times to have them reflect on the process of what was working, what wasn’t working in the class and what was working and what was not working in their own learning processes and what I can do and what they could do to help them learn more effectively.

Rebecca: I don’t know about you, but I was really surprised at how well synchronous learning actually went for me. I had some technical difficulties early on with my internet connection. It took me a while, but I got around to fixing that problem by hardwiring my internet and resolving some of those things. But I felt just as connected to my students as I would normally. I had a lot of interactions. And in some ways, I was able to facilitate those interactions a little more equitably online, because it wasn’t just the person who came to nudge me and stand in line and be the next person. Instead, I could really coordinate using waiting rooms and breakout rooms and really give everybody a chance to have one-on-one interactions with me, which I really appreciated. And I really did get to know all of my students quite well, which I was a little bit surprised about. And then, in an area where it’s really technicalaAnd we’re doing a lot of coding and things on screen, being able to share screens and take control of another person’s computer to fix things or show them how to do something was incredibly valuable. We use some of those kinds of tools in person. But it actually was, I think, in some cases more effective using this particular tool. So I was kind of surprised at how well some things worked. And I think that even when things go back to face to face, there’s definitely some components here that I would keep.

John: I’d agree. And I think students were amazed at how well some of those tools work. When in breakout rooms, they would be using the whiteboard features, they would be sharing screens, they’d be making the case, they’d be drawing on the screens, and that was something that would be much harder to do in a face-to-face environment. Initially, at the beginning of the class, I had some issues with chat being kind of flooded with irrelevant material, and I had to clamp down on that a little bit. But within a couple of weeks, they started actually using it very productively, and it provided a voice for all students, even those quiet students who would have otherwise sat in the back of this large lecture hall. They were able to type something in chat, after thinking about what they wanted to say before doing it, without being concerned about interrupting the discussion that was going on. And I think that was really helpful. And when I taught large classes with three to 400 students, there’s almost always 3 to 10 Students who have trouble not having side conversations when there’s other activities going on. And that mute option is kind of a nice feature and the ability to set their microphones so they’re all muted unless they choose to unmute… to have the default being muted until people click the unmute option… made it really easy. And I was amazed at how quickly they adjusted to muting and unmuting. By the end of the term there was maybe only once or twice a class where a family member or someone else would walk into the room and start talking. And then they’d remember, they had to mute their mics, and it was very rare. In a class that large, I was impressed by it… and working with students one on one, during office hours, it was so much easier to have students just share the screen and show you exactly what their problems were then to correspond with them with email, or even have them boot up their computer or you try to find what they were talking about when they came to your office. It was just much more efficient.

Rebecca: Yeah, I could actually see it. You can Zoom in, you can see what they’re talking about. I also found, and I was really floored, in this last week of classes, students were doing their final presentations,at how well they did develop facility with these tools. They’ve developed a lot of fluency in the kinds of tools that are actually very relevant to my particular discipline. It’s relevant to many disciplines. But designers use these tools all the time when they’re working with clients. And so it was amazing to me that we got through 15 presentations so efficiently. We didn’t wait for anybody to share their screen. They just knew what they needed to prepare, had it ready, they started developing slide decks really effectively, and could just do the things that they needed to do really efficiently. One of the last things I said to my class was like “I’m so proud of you just being able to do that. We didn’t have to wait for anybody today. That was amazing.” And so maybe a little bit of a blessing in disguise, you hate saying like, “Oh, the plague is such a great thing.” But they really did develop some useful skills and tools and they became more effective communicators. That was something that a lot of students reflected on and things that they didn’t expect to learn is how much better they became collaborators and just communicators generally… not just in person, like through Zoom or in text… like through chat in Slack.

John: Video conferencing is likely to be a part of their lives in the foreseeable future, especially now that everyone has adapted tp this mode, it’s very useful for them to learn how to use that efficiently. The one thing I do miss though, is seeing their faces in person and recognizing them. One concern that I have is, I’m hoping to be back on campus in the fall, there may be students that I work with who interact with me regularly, whose voice I would recognize or whose name I would recognize on the screen, but whose face I just wouldn’t recognize because a very large proportion of students just didn’t feel comfortable having their cameras on regularly, and I understand that. We’ve got a lot of students living in crowded living quarters or working with very poor network connections. But I do miss actually physically seeing them. And I had my last class session earlier today. And I encouraged them to stop by in the fall and just say hello.

Rebecca: Yeah, I mean, I agree that the physicality is certainly something that’s missing. But it was amazing to me how connected I still felt to all of the students at the end of the semester. And I think that they felt connected to each other too and they verbalized that, and also wrote that in their Jamboard reflection. So although there’s much to be improved, given this was the first time out and an experiment in many ways. I’m really thankful that I read Flower Darby’s book about Small Teaching Online because that actually informed a lot of my practices, even though it was synchronous, and a lot of her material was about asynchronous learning. It really did help me remind myself of things that I already knew that I needed to do, but to kind of make a checklist of things that I definitely needed to do as I was rethinking my classes for the fall. So thanks for chatting with me, John.

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

Rebecca: I am sitting down to reflect on what worked and what didn’t work, to try to troubleshoot some things for the spring. And I’m teaching a class that’s brand new to our curriculum for the first time in the spring. And so we’re developing it for online synchronous, although ultimately, it’ll probably be a face-to-face class. We’ve had to re-conceptualize some of the things that we were going to do because of the technology limitations that students may have. If they’re online, we’re expecting that we might have a lot of students who are relying on their phones versus software and having access to high-end software packages or computers that can run them. So we’ve had to rethink things. But I’m pretty excited about being able to experiment with my students with all kinds of technology in the spring, but it’s definitely a puzzle that I’m currently starting to work on. How about you, John?

John: Well, I still have a lot of grading to do. But once that is done, one of the things I’m going to be doing is converting a textbook I had written in econometrics to a Pressbooks site, which will be a lot of conversion because it’s originally in LaTex, a typesetting language used for mathematical typing and I’m planning to create a lot of videos, I’m hoping to get many of them done over the break so that I’m not spending 15 or 20 hours a week creating videos as I was all fall. And I’m hoping to get a little bit further ahead of the semester this time, so I’m not doing as much preparation at the last moment. And we’re both going to be working on putting together a series of workshops in January for our faculty to help people prepare for whatever comes at them this spring

Rebecca: We’re just going to be really busy.[LAUGHTER]

John: I’ve never spent as many hours working on my classes as I have this semester.

Rebecca: I agree. There was a lot of startup costs converting to this modality, but I’m hoping a lot of that stuff I’ll be able to keep and reuse moving forward. Thanks, John. Always nice talking to you, John. We chat all the time. But it’s nice to sometimes hear about some of the thought process and things behind some of the decisions that you’ve made in your classes. So it was really nice to actually hear about how you did some of that stuff this semester. So thanks.

John: And I also appreciate hearing more about what you’ve been doing in your classes. We spend most of our time on podcasts talking to our guests and only mentioning little snippets of what we’ve been doing ourselves.

[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]

100th Episode Reflection

Today we reached our hundredth episode milestone. In this episode, we reflect back on several common themes that have emerged in a number of recent podcast episodes. We also discuss changes that we’ve made in our current classes in response to discussions with some of our recent guests.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Today we reached our hundredth episode milestone. We invite you to celebrate with us and reflect on how our guests have contributed to how you approach teaching and 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: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

John: Today’s teas are:

Rebecca: Golden Monkey, it’s a celebration day.

John: …and I’m drinking ginger peach black tea. It’s just another day.

We thought we’d start by talking about why we began this podcast series. One of the reasons for this is that we’ve observed that a growing number of faculty were not able to make it to our regular workshops on campus. And w e wanted to find a way to reach out and provide them with some assistance.

Rebecca: We have a lot of faculty who commute or have other family commitments and obligations and a lot of part-time faculty. So, we thought this was a good opportunity to provide on-demand professional development. We both had been really into listening to podcasts at the time, too. So I think that was a motivator. I’m not sure either of us thought we would actually make it to 100 episodes.

John: No, in fact, we were going to try this for a few months to see how it worked. And we both have been, I think, really pleasantly surprised at how well it caught on on our campus and more broadly. We now have listeners in over 100 countries and every US state.

Rebecca: John nudged me a lot at the beginning because I was a little resistant to the idea of doing the podcast. But we’ve been really fortunate to have really wonderful guests and to get to talk to some really amazing people. And it’s really the guests that we’ve had that have made the podcast what it is.

John: The only downside is that every time we have a new guest, I think both of us come up with some ideas that we’d like to integrate into our classes. And there’s a limit just to how much we can do at any given semester.

Rebecca: So, clearly, we need some episodes on prioritization and time management. [LAUGHTER].

John: …and people have often asked us for things on that, but neither of us, perhaps, are as good at that as we could be.

Rebecca: Or maybe the alternative is people who are really good at that don’t want to spend their time doing a podcast.

John: That’s true. Because whenever we’ve had people who we were told were really good at that , they’ve always just said “No.”

Rebecca: We’ve had a lot of informal feedback from our listeners and conversations and emails that really demonstrate that need for on-demand professional development in the way that you can listen to it on the go. But also, we have seen a lot of folks that are using the transcripts and things as well as reference. We had one listener who called in and left us a nice message that captures a lot of the sentiments that we’ve gotten internally. And so we want to share that little clip with you right now.

Carlo: Hi, Rebecca, and John. My name is Carlo Cuccaro. I’m an adjunct instructor… been teaching for 25 years for SUNY Oswego, primarily in the Counseling and Psychological Services, and Extended Learning departments. I also occasionally teach for Curriculum and Instruction. So, while I love teaching, I have to admit that my journey through the process of becoming a teacher has been interesting in that no one taught me how to teach. My role models were my former professors, and I use my own experiences as a student to kind of shape my approach to teaching. But I had to come to the realization that I really needed to become a more reflective instructor and look at a lot of issues around teaching and learning. And over the years, I’ve been able to do that in many ways, kind of on my own. But I have to admit and compliment you in that your podcast has become instrumental in my own journey as a teacher and my self improvement. As an aside, I’m a long distance runner; I run six days a week, on weekends I run anywhere from 16 to 24 miles, I’ve run 50K races and marathons. And so your podcast has kept me company on many a run. And I found myself stopping in the middle of a run to take my phone out and jot down something or record something that I wanted to remember from one of your podcasts, be it about using social media, or technology, or reflecting on attention span in students, or just overall pedagogy. There’s so many things I’ve taken from your podcast that have improved my teaching and I’ve been able to integrate specifically into my courses with really positive student feedback, and a good feeling about how I am growing as a teacher. So I wanted to thank you for all of your hard work, for your great guests, for you’re being just an amazing resource to me and to many others. Congratulations, and keep on keepin on.

John: We thank Carlo for his feedback. And we’re glad that this has been working for him and so many other people who’ve commented on how they enjoy the podcast on their drives, while they’re exercising, while they’re doing household work, and so on.

Rebecca: It’s that kind of feedback that I think motivates us to continue doing the podcast, there’s days when we’re overwhelmed and have too much to do and it can seem daunting to take on another interview or another episode. We certainly get a lot out of interviewing the guests, but it’s even more meaningful when we know that what everyone’s learning is improving classrooms for a lot of students.

John: We last did a reflection in Episode 62, and we talked about some of the major things we had taken away. But we thought now that we’ve had so many podcasts it might be useful, just to reflect back on some of the themes that have been bubbling up in our more recent episodes.

Rebecca: One of the things that we’ve heard from faculty in our conversations, but also from a lot of our guests as we’ve been chatting, is how underprepared a lot of faculty feel when they enter the profession to be a teacher.They’re prepared to be a researcher or an artist or what have you, but don’t necessarily feel prepared to help students learn effectively. They can do the same things that they’ve seen before, but don’t necessarily know the most effective strategies.

John: That’s partly because of the incentives that graduate schools face. They often get their prestige measured by how well they place their graduates in R1 institutions… and the tools that they need in R1 institutions are generally research skills. And there’s not always a lot of effort there on teaching either, on the part of the faculty or in the training of graduate students. There have been some notable exceptions and we’ve talked about some of those in past podcasts.

Rebecca: In Episode 84—Barriers to Active Learning, Lindsay Wheeler and Hannah Sturtevant talk a lot about their observations or the observations that their research team made of faculty in the classroom and the kinds of activities they were actually doing, and made observations that although faculty might even report that they’re doing active learning, it’s kind of limited. And so not knowing different ways to implement those strategies is often a barrier.

John: As our classrooms have become increasingly diverse in terms of the mix of students, with more first-generation students and a wider mix in terms of students from various socio-economic status groups, we need to be better prepared to provide a more inclusive environment that works for all of our students, and not just the traditional students of past decades. We had a very interesting discussion of the new MOOC that Cornell has put together, where Melkina Ivanchikova and Mathew Ouellet talked about the development of that MOOC. We also had a great discussion with with Amer Ahmed on inclusive pedagogy.

Rebecca: And some of the things that I thought were really exciting are some of the episodes that talked a lot about moving away from a traditional lecture format, and offered some other ways of thinking about operating in the classroom. Some of my favorites were episodes 74: Uncoverage by David Voelker, and Episode 70: Dynamic Lecturing by Christine Harrington. Both of those offer different ways of thinking about what content should actually be covered or uncovered in the classroom, and also ways to mix things up in the classroom so it isn’t just straight lecture.

John: And in particular, Christine Harrington basically reminded us that lecture can be effective when it’s done well, which involves making it much more interactive. But there’s also been a lot of podcasts recently that remind us that most students enter our classrooms knowing very little about how they learn. So quite a few of our episodes have been addressing metacognition, and how we can help students become more effective in their learning.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we’ve had a lot of conversations about just as we’re picking potential guests to reach out to or with our colleagues on campus, is how important helping students learn how to learn is. They’re in our classes and we expect them to already know how to learn, and we don’t take the time to meet students where they’re at and know that that’s something that we actually need to talk about, and help them develop and nurture them through that journey of figuring out what it means to be a learner, and to be an independent learner. And so, I think a lot of the episodes that we’ve had that talk about metacognition… that’s really what’s at the heart there… is finding ways that we can start helping students recognize ways that they can be more effective learners. And the onus isn’t always on the teacher to be an effective teacher, but also to just make sure that students know how to learn and how the class is structured in a way that can help them learn.

John: Because the development of those goals will help them not only in their current class, but in future classes and throughout their life. One of our most recent episodes was Developing Metacognition by Judith Boettcher. And she talked about how that could be done in an online framework with project-based learning and problem-based learning.

Rebecca: I think that episode happened in a really critical moment for me in particular… that I immediately started having students set goals and do all kinds of things right at the beginning of the semester that I maybe hadn’t fully intended to do, because I became more and more aware that I’ve been trying to do things to help students develop their metacognition, but that had some specific tips and tools that worked really well for the kinds of things that I was already doing. And it felt like a really good way to integrate it.

John: …and another episode that I think had a lot of influence on you, particularly, was the episode I’m specifications grading with Linda Nilson. Could you tell us what you’ve done in response to that episode?

Rebecca: Yeah, I went all in this semester. So I’m not out so far, I’m unscathed in the approach, but I decided to go all in and structure my class so that it has specifications grading as the key way that I am doing grading on individual assignments and projects. I use some of the bundling techniques that she talks about, but not for the whole course. So there’s an essential bundle that everyone has to do at the beginning of the course. And then there’s a big project that students can choose different sets of specifications that they can meet in these collaborative projects for two-thirds of the class. And so far, that initial bundle that everyone’s required to do, all the students, although they were a little concerned and a little panicky about the idea that we have to keep doing it until they got it right. We’ve been doing a lot of revision, and students are really developing those fundamental skills that they’re going to need to do a more complicated project. And so that seems to be really effective.

John: And that podcast works very nicely or ties very nicely to the other podcast we did with Linda Nilson on Self-Regulated Learning, which focuses on how we can help students improve their own skills at learning.

Rebecca: I know that you’ve talked a lot about the ways you’re trying to raise students awareness of metacognition in your own classes. Were there some episodes more recently that have changed how your practices worked at all?

John: One topic that we revisited in our more recent podcasts is open pedagogy, particularly with the episode by Jessica Kruger on her Just-In-Time textbook, where she had a whole class write a textbook. I like that so much, I did it in my spring 2019 class. But I also have students in my introductory class this term working on a podcast project. So, I’m really excited about that. And many of the students are excited… many of them are really, really nervous about it. But I think they’ll get through that. I think open pedagogy is a topic that has come up as a method of really increasing student learning as well as student engagement. And my perception is that they are learning the topics much more deeply when they have to write about them and present them in a public form.

Rebecca: That goes to the idea of teaching others and so you’re going to be more prepared if you have to explain to someone else because you have to practice so I can see how students might actually develop those metacognitive skills in a sneaky kind of way in those contexts, because they might feel embarrassed if they aren’t successful if it is in public.

John: In terms of developing students skills, Michelle Miller provided two podcasts for us since our last reflection. One on her Attention Matters module, which is a module that they’ve used at Northern Arizona University and many other schools to help students learn about attention and focus and to improve their learning skills by focusing their attention. And Michelle also talked about retrieval practice in Episode 65, which was a really nice overview of the importance of retrieval practice in learning, as well as the discussion of a wide variety of techniques that people can easily introduce in their classes to help improve their learning.

Rebecca: And a good overview of a lot of these evidence-based practices was introduced in Episode 64 – How Humans Learn by Josh Eyler. Metacognition certainly comes up there as well, but also a lot of these other evidence-based practices to help students develop their learning skills.

John: One other theme that came up in many of these podcasts was the importance of reflection, we had an episode by JoNelle Toriseva: Episode 93 on Reflective Writing, which talked about this very nicely.

Rebecca: That episode had a lot in common with Episode 98, that we already mentioned (Developing Metacognition with Judith Boettcher), because there’s a lot of focus on goal setting, and I was really excited to see how effective setting goals was for students and how seriously they actually take that activity. So if you’re a little skeptical, I’d encourage you to check out both of those episodes and think about how to get your students to reflect on their learning and to set some goals.

John: More broadly, a lot of our episodes, since our last reflection, have focused on creating a positive environment within our classroom that provides students with an environment that’s conducive to learning for all the students in the class. A really good discussion of much of that occurs in our interview with Sarah Rose Cavanagh on Emotions and Learning, and the importance of emotions for learning and how we can use that to improve the amount that students learn.

Rebecca: Although that’s the only one that has emotion in the title, I think one of the things that’s really interesting that’s come up in a number of episodes is that emotions aren’t separate from learning. Emotions impact learning, and I think that’s something that a lot of faculty might be resistant to on a surface level. It might be something you immediately take pause to and think “Wait, that doesn’t apply to what I do.” We’re thinking we want to be rational and have debates that are based only on facts, but emotions play into how we interpret and interact with our environment and with information. And a lot of episodes talked about the role that emotions play. In Episode 77 with Lisa Nunn, not only was there a lot about metacognition, but there’s a lot about emotion and thinking about some of the anxieties and things for someone who’s new to a particular kind of learning environment, like a college setting, or how that setting might be really different from high school.

John: Cyndi Kernahan talked about ways of building a comfortable environment for discussing difficult issues involving race in Episode 89.

Rebecca: In that episode, and also in 82: Geeky Pedagogy by Jessamyn Neuhaus, there’s a lot of conversation about identity and the role that your identity as a faculty member, as well as identities of students play in these conversations, that has bigger implications and bigger complicated conversations that might be difficult or challenging to have. But understanding that we all have identities… that crossover and a lot of different places is important in our conversations. That was also true in Episode 96 – Inclusive Pedagogy.

John: One of the interesting things pointed out in Geeky Pedagogy is that the personalities and interests and motivations of faculty are not necessarily the same as those of our students. So she provides a really nice discussion of how we can use our own personality effectively in teaching students who might have very different motivations and incentives than us. Because the people who choose to become faculty are not random selections of people from the college body. And it’s sometimes a difficult adjustment in working with students who have very differ ent personalities, motivations, and interests.

Rebecca: Although I can’t point to a particular episode, one of the things that has been bubbling up in a lot of the conversations we’ve had on the podcast, but in also some of the other work that I’ve been doing with colleagues related to accessibility. And it ties into what you’re talking about, about that particular episode, is all these assumptions that we have. And we just don’t even realize that we have them, but they’re built into our environment, and they’re built into the Academy. And as we recognize what those assumptions are, we can start to figure out ways to dismantle those structures that prevent students from being successful or even prevent us as instructors from being successful in the classroom.

John: When we’re talking about classroom climate, we’ve also had quite a few episodes that have dealt with classroom climate in online, hybrid, or HyFlex courses. And specifically, in Episode 79 on Self-Learning versus Online Instruction, Spiros Protopsaltis and Sandy Baum talked about the importance of interaction within the online environment. That was also emphasized by Flower Darby in her discussion of her book Small Teaching Online, in which she talked about a wide variety of methods that we could use to keep our online classes much more engaging, and much more interactive and effective. And in last week’s episode, Judie Littlejohn talked about how HyFlex courses can also be used to provide students with a more flexible environment to meet the needs of students who cannot accommodate a traditional face-to-face course schedule.

Rebecca: And Episode 87: Social Presence in Online Courses is another one with Allegra Davis Hannah and Misty Wilson-Merhtens.

John: And I’d also recommend their podcast, The Profess-hers, which I listen to regularly, and it’s quite good.

Rebecca: There’s also a wide smattering of episodes that we can’t possibly detail out here. But one that stands out is Episode 73: The Injustice League by Margaret Schmuhl that talks a lot about ways to get first-year students to feel engaged and part of the larger Academy and getting them involved with activities, getting them integrated into the community, and the role that a faculty member should perhaps play in helping students become a member of that bigger conversation.

John: …creating that emotional engagement, again, that was discussed in these other episodes.

Rebecca: We’ve talked a lot about metacognition and classroom climate bubbling up as interesting themes. And neither of those are necessarily things that first come to mind, I don’t think, for faculty about what professional development as a faculty member is. So, I think that that’s kind of interesting that those are topics that come up and just about any conversations that we’ve been having. So John, where do you want to go next? What are some things that you’re hoping that we start talking about in the future?

John: Well, where I want to go now is to Disney World… I mean to the Online Learning Consortium conference in November, where I think you’ll be going, too. But in terms of future podcasts, there’s a lot of things that are left to explore, there’s so many new studies coming out that we’d like to talk to some of the authors of and there’s so many people doing interesting things that we’d like to talk more to.

Rebecca: I know that one thing that we’ve started having some episodes on, but not nearly enough is really about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. All of the things that we’re talking about in evidence-based practices obviously come out of scholarship and come out of research. But we don’t always talk a lot about how faculty can start doing some of their own research in their own context with students. And I think that that’s an area that faculty are interested in, but don’t always know how to get started in.

John: We did have a nice episode on that, that we reflected on earlier with Regan Gurung. But that is an area that we should investigate more. And at the very least, it would be nice to talk to some of the people doing the research studies to find out more about how they did it and how perhaps other people might extend that research or where future research can go. So what are you doing next, Rebecca?

Rebecca: So, I’m going on sabbatical. And I’m really excited about studying accessibility further. I’ve been collecting data over the last year and a half in my classes about how students engage with, or relate to, the concept of accessibility and how they implement accessible practices in the design work that they do. So I’ve been collecting data… have done a very minimal analysis of it to see that things looks like they’re going well. But I’ve done a number of different interventions each semester, so I can do some comparisons. And so I’m looking forward to exploring that as well as putting together some resources for faculty who are doing projects where students are making things in public. So similar to some of the open pedagogy things, there’s a lot of people putting stuff out in public and having their students create things in public. But they don’t always think a lot about audience. And when they’re thinking about audience, they’re often not thinking about people with disabilities… or who might listen or interact with materials in a way that they don’t. How about you, John? What’s next for you?

John: Well, I’m actually doing two things new this semester. One is I have switched over to Lumen Learning’s Waymaker package, which is a personalized learning system, which we discussed in an earlier episode with Steve Greenlaw, who actually developed much of the economic material. And that’s been working really well, students are generally liking it. But I’m building a lot of materials week by week to supplement it and to flesh it out a little bit more. And the other thing I’m doing new is, in my online class, partly inspired by the open pedagogy podcast we’ve had before and presentations by Robin DeRosa and others, I used an open pedagogy project this spring. And we actually talked about that in an earlier podcast. And one of the things that, to me at least, came through was just how excited and engaged the students who were involved in that work. They really enjoyed putting work out there… something that they could show to their families, their friends, and so forth. And they learned about the topic much more deeply than if it was just a disposable assignment at the end of the class where no one other than the instructor would ever see that again. So, this time, I’m having students do podcasts on applications of introductory microeconomics. And I’m giving them the option of either keeping them within the class or sharing them more publicly. And some students are really nervous about that, b ut others are really excited about it. It’s early on right now. And I’m trying to scaffold the project to make them more comfortable. And I’m really looking forward to what they produce. And if it works well, this will be a publicly shared podcast that will involve applications of basic concepts in microeconomics to things in the news.

Rebecca: That sounds exciting… sounds like a future episode could be discussing that potential project.

John: We’ll see how it goes. I’m cautiously optimistic about it.

Rebecca: Sounds really similar to a lot of responses we get when we ask faculty to talk about the projects we’re working on.

John: it’s always easier to do it in retrospect, but so far, I’ve been really pleased with what students have been doing.

Well, thank you all for listening. We have some really great guests lined up for the next few months. We’re looking forward to our next reflection episode,

Rebecca: …and maybe one of our next guests will be you.

Most importantly, I think we need to thank all of the guests for the first 100 episodes because without those guests, we wouldn’t have a podcast and we wouldn’t have really great conversations or way too many things to do in our classrooms.

[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.

94. Open Reflection

Students can provide useful feedback on instructional practices and class design when they are asked, In this episode, three students from John’s spring economics capstone class join us to provide their reflections on the class’s experiment in developing an open pedagogy project. Our guests in today’s episode are Maria Aldrich, Victoria Heist and Charlie Tararzona.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Students can provide useful feedback on instructional practices and class design when they are asked. In this episode, students join us to provide an open reflection on one class’s experiment in developing an open pedagogy project.

[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: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Maria Aldrich, Victoria Heist and Charlie Tarazona, three students who participated in the creation of an open pedagogy project in one of my economics classes this spring semester. Welcome.

Victoria: Thanks for having us.

Maria: Thank you.

Charlie: Yep, excited to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are…

John: None of you are drinking tea, are you?

Maria: No.

Victoria: No tea.

Charlie: No tea today.

Rebecca: How regretful. [LAUGHTER]

John: It happens with many of our guests. I’m having ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: And I’m drinking Lady Grey. The issue is our tea selection is no longer close to our recording studio. It’s a problem. It’s an epidemic now with our tea choices.

John: …now that we’re recording in this little closet in a building next door, where at least we don’t have toilets flushing every 30 seconds or so that we have to edit out.

Rebecca: So John, can you start first by explaining what open pedagogy is, to kind of frame our discussion?

John: Going back a step further. Last year, I saw a presentation by Robin DeRosa who presented on this at the SUNY Conference on Instruction and Technology and she made a really compelling case for some of the advantages that open pedagogy projects have. And open pedagogy just involves having students create content that is open and shared publicly with the world.

Rebecca: So what class did you do an open pedagogy project in?

John: This class is a capstone course in the economics department here. It’s taken mostly by seniors and a few juniors. And it’s a seminar course in economic theory and policy. It’s one of our smaller classes. And we had only 27 students in this capstone, this semester.

Rebecca: So why this class?

John: Because the students were ready for it. The course builds on all the courses that they’ve had up to this point and it allows them to pull together material they’ve learned in all of their prior courses, as well as the cognate classes in statistics and math and so on.

Rebecca: So what kind of project exactly did you propose to these students?

John: I originally proposed two options. One was to do something on behavioral economics, because past classes have found that to be a lot of fun, and another one I suggested was they could just pick current topics and work in small groups and create papers on that. Turned out that they really didn’t like any of those ideas and given the nature of open pedagogy, I left it up to the class to decide what their topics would be. And I think it was actually Charlie, who came up with the idea. And would you like to tell us what that was?

Charlie: I know you had mentioned in the beginning of the class the idea of open pedagogy. And I found that pretty interesting because it seemed like a good opportunity for us as seniors and juniors to really put what we had learned out there. And also, in terms of topic selection, you gave us the opportunity to really choose which topics we wanted to talk about. We ended up choosing the topic of intergenerational mobility and economic inequality. We focused more on the economic inequality aspect of it in the end. But yeah, like I said, it was just a good opportunity for everybody to really finish their college careers with something that they can show.

Rebecca: Dr. Kane is going to close his ears now and you guys are going to tell us exactly what you thought when he said, “Hey, you’re going to write a book.”

Victoria: I was hesitant at first, just because group projects are kind of daunting, especially in economics. However, a collaborative group project was exciting to do… to see all of our work put together. As economic students it isn’t something you really see, it’s usually individual work.

Maria: Oh, yeah, I would agree with Victoria. I was kind of hesitant at first, especially because it was something new for our class so I figured there are probably a lot of kinks that needed to be fixed. So I was a little worried about not having everything fully figured out at first. I thought it was something interesting. It appealed to me because I like the thought that other people could read what we had written and we could have control of what we would want to talk about.

Charlie: And the topic and the idea of a book project really intrigued me… that it just let us put out there what we had learned over these past few years and gave us something that we can show in the end of it.

Rebecca: Were any of you scared?

Victoria: Not scared. I wouldn’t use that word.

John: Were you concerned?

Victoria: A bit concerned, just because I like doing my individual work. I feel stronger in that.

Maria: Yeah, I would agree. I think group work can sometimes be difficult to have for every class because everyone has a different writing style and everyone works on their projects at different times. So I think at first, you’re a little bit worried that not everyone will be able to work well together. But I found that in my group, we were able to work very well and we’re able to meet once a week to go over what we needed to work on for the week.

Charlie: Yeah, I found something similar to that experience. Whereas my group, after the first few weeks, figured out what we wanted to do, and when we could meet, and what was the most effective way for us to put the book project together? And I think it turned out really well.

Rebecca: So you’ve all mentioned groups, can you talk a little bit about what the groups were, how they were determined, and how that worked?

Victoria: The groups were groups of three from the class, because there’s 27 people. And then we’re able to email Professor Kane and ask if we wanted to work with anyone specific, like if we had friends in the class, we could work with them. But if not, or if we didn’t want to work with someone we knew, we’re able to randomize it.

Maria: I was put into a group of two other random people that I didn’t know, but we were able to set up a group chat immediately and communicate very well through that.

Charlie: I actually emailed Professor Kane about being a group in Victoria and we also included another student in that. I think it worked out pretty well and I was happy with how it turned out.

John: Before the groups were formed, though, the class decided on what the topics would be. So we had kind of a free-form planning session where we narrowed it down to nine topics you wanted to address. And then at that point, we knew how big the groups were going to be. And it worked out nicely with three people per group.

Rebecca: How did each group get assigned a topic?

Charlie: So the way we assigned topics was, we had created a list of the nine topics, and then each individual group could choose their top three, and then we divided them that way based on everybody’s top choice. If they didn’t happen to get their top choice, they usually got their second or third, I think that only happened for maybe two groups, and they seem to be fine with what they ended up with.

John: And going back a little bit further, it was a weighted voting scheme that you didn’t just rank them… that you assigned points, if I remember was it 10 points I gave you? And so if you really wanted to chapter you could bid all 10 points on that. And if you were indifferent, you could have assigned weight to your top three preferences and so forth. And it did work out really nicely where I think most groups got their top choice, but two of them ended up with their second or third choice, but it seemed to work.

Rebecca: How did you find collaborating in the end?

Charlie: I found that it worked really well meeting every week. We also had presentations every week that we gave on specific topics that we’re talking about during that week. So that set the initial schedule for us to meet every week and talk about what we were doing and what was going on. Also with the book project at the time, in terms of organization, I found it very laid out and simple.

Rebecca: That sounds like you had a writing group that met that frequently, but it also would be more of like a study group as well?

Charlie: Yeah, I would definitely say it was a mix between a writing group… a study group. Your group members ended up being the way, if you wanted to succeed in the class, like that was the way to do it was to work cohesively with your group members.

John: And it should be noted that they had other tasks in the class as well, where they selected topics that were presented each week and each group was responsible for presenting an article or a research paper on a topic, some of which were related to the book and others were completely different. The groups were persistent across all the assignments and involved more than just writing the book.

Rebecca: How’d you get feedback to make sure whatever you’re putting out in the public was good enough?

Maria: Well, we mainly used Google Docs. At first, we tried to use hypothesis. But that wasn’t really working out well. So we ended up just going back to Google Docs. And each group would be given a couple of chapters to review each week. And they would write a couple comments in that chapter as well as some comments made by our professor and we used that and we also used each other’s feedback to make those edits.

John: How did that work? Where the comments helpful?

Victoria: No. [LAUGHTER] Just because I’m very protective over my work, which I know I should be open to criticisms. However, I got some comments sometimes I was just like questioning, like instead of “what about this article that you might want to look at” it would be “change this word,” where I know we emphasized that often in class many, many times, but still people would persistently do that.

John: I hope that wasn’t from me. Was it from me?

Victoria: Oh, no. Well, if you wanted to do that, you’re the professor. You can do that. But you also give us feedback that’s helpful. Whereas, students I feel like if they’re rushed or doing it, like 20 minutes before the class, they’re not going to look at me like, “Oh, what about this topic that might be interesting to consider.” Instead, they’re like, “Switch this word.” That just might be the students in the class too, just because we did have a lot of work in the class. And I found that because our group would meet to practice our presentation before the class, a lot of groups are doing their final work 15 minutes before the class.

John: Yes, the quality of the work did vary a little bit across the groups and across the individuals within the groups. Overall, there was some really high quality work, and all three of you did really well. But the quality of the feedback varied quite a bit.

Rebecca: So the feedback was generally done outside of class? Like not during class time?

John: Primarily, except for the presentations on the work where there was some feedback during the presentations.

Victoria: Yes, but I found that your feedback was most helpful, rather than the students.

Maria: Yeah, I would say I paid a lot more attention to Professor Kane’s feedback than some of my fellow students. Luckily, we didn’t have that experience. We had a lot of people give a sincere, really constructive feedback, but sometimes I’d be hesitant to take that feedback because I didn’t know that was the direction that I should be going in. But I definitely think our experience was a little better and our comments were more substantial, I would say.

Victoria: And I think next time maybe switching the groups that review the feedback might be helpful, because if you have one group that gives worse feedback, and you keep getting that, it’s not as helpful.

John: The way it was structured was each group reviewed and provided comments on three other groups, and we did that on three stages. And the class decided to maintain persistent groups there. I did give them the option, but I think it does make much more sense to vary it so you’re getting a wider range of feedback.

Charlie: I think the idea to keep persistent groups stem from the fact that we wanted to have somebody read the paper and then continue to read the paper throughout the weeks when we were supposed to be improving it or making it better. So then they could also see the changes we were making. And I agree with my classmates where I think we can say that it didn’t work out too well. There’s some groups just didn’t happen to give feedback that was too good.

Victoria: I also think part of it was the length of the papers because each of us had to review three full papers for the weeks that we did that, and three 20-page papers is a lot of reading to do on student written economics. And I think maybe in the beginning it was helpful to read all three, but maybe as time went on to scale that back a little bit, so we don’t get burnt out.

John: More detailed feedback on a smaller number of papers.

Victoria: Yeah because at first, I find myself doing it too. Like the first paper, I’ll take the time to read every single word and provide helpful feedback. But I can see myself not doing as much on the third.

John: I gave feedback in three different ways. The first time I gave video feedback, and while I’ve heard that that can be really efficient, I was taking about two hours or so per paper. And that was really slow and people really didn’t like the feedback that much because some of the feedback was fairly long in terms of the suggestions. So, I probably gave a little too much feedback. The second was with comments embedded in Adobe. And the third time I just basically went along with everyone else and provided the feedback directly in Google Docs. And the nice thing about that is I was able to see some other suggestions and sometimes I’d say, “Well, maybe that’s not such a good idea.” Because in many cases, the original draft actually made more sense than the feedback.

Rebecca: What way did you all like feedback better?

Charlie: I think the best feedback I received was actually in class feedback when I would go to Professor Kane and ask him, “Hey, you know, this is what’s going on with my paper. Is there something else I could look at? Is there another source I can find?” I found that to be the most effective in helping me write the paper. I was also a fan of the comments in Google Docs, they were pretty helpful.

Maria: Yeah, I think the most helpful feedback were the comments from Google Docs because, for that last draft, I was able to go through and resolve any comments that I had made the changes to and that just helped motivate me to make my draft a really good copy. And then I would say that I was really against the video feedback because I personally like to review feedback multiple times. I like to go through it and make changes to it. And I found myself just typing up his comments at the end of the doc so that other teammates could see it as well. So I was definitely against the video feedback and prefer the Google Doc comments.

Victoria: Yeah, I prefer Google Docs as well, just because I could see where exactly you wanted the changes done. It gave more specific feedback and then it also gave the students validity I guess, like this should be changed. Like I made a comment in one paper and said, “I think you mean a different word.” And they just resolved it and moved on. But then Professor Kane came through and said, “Yes, I agree.” And I think that you agreed, and they now are aware that yes, those changes need to be made.

Rebecca: I think sometimes when a faculty member responds to student comments in a way that it also helps students know how to make better comments. So it would be interesting to see how another round of that would have gone after Dr. Kane had responded to some of those right? To see if the comments were better the next time around.

John: Yeah, I think I should have done that from the beginning. And I’m sorry, I didn’t. But in the future, I’ll probably use Hypothesis. Now that we have Hypothesis in Blackboard it will be much easier. Among the problems we had is that people had some trouble making comments on Google Docs because they also had edit access to those and they couldn’t mark up specific text. And with PDFs, that was a bit of a problem given the way the browsers were set up that they had to change a program in order to make comments on PDF documents. So now that we have that in our learning management system, it’s going to be much easier to do that and the comments will be a little more persistent, because one of the issues was people were, as you mentioned, resolving comments sometimes before anyone else had a chance to see them. And the strategy was to have the draft documents with the comments copied over to another folder, and they were only supposed to make changes in their working document, not in the documents used for comments. But there were three or four people who through three drafts, just didn’t quite get that notion and I’d see the email saying that comments were resolved, and I would go back in and unresolve them. But in any case, there were some problems with those. That’s an issue that I think has to be worked out a little bit more efficiently.

Rebecca: Beside some of the technical issues that we mentioned, what were some of the biggest challenges of working on a project like this?

Charlie: I think one of the bigger challenges was keeping the cohesive idea behind the whole book where the topic we had chose was income inequality and we also had talked about intergenerational mobility. But as the book progressed, we kind of saw that portion of the book fall off a little bit where chapters were really focusing on the income and economic inequality topic.

Rebecca: So is that something you discussed in class to keep everybody on track?

Charlie: I think we mentioned it at one point towards the end, we’re just like, “Okay, are we going to keep this? Are we going to not keep this?” And I think we agreed, we could talk about it but we won’t make it a major portion of the book.

John: There was also some scaffolding on the project… that it didn’t just start with people starting to write, groups were first asked to put together a bibliography, and then an annotated bibliography, and then an outline of the chapter, and then the actual writing started after they had feedback on each of those steps.

Maria: I would agree with Charlie, I was definitely worried about the cohesiveness of the entire book. But for my group, specifically, we did a very broad topic, the global trends of economic inequality, and for myself, it was really hard to find relevant subjects to talk about because it was just such a broad topic. It was really hard for each of us to find something that we could spend a large amount of time writing about. So I’m not sure how the other groups felt. But for us, it was definitely hard narrowing down what we specifically wanted to talk about, and then to find resources that were recent enough to include.

Victoria: Yeah, I agree with you on that. I think one change I would make after we figure out the specific topics, you can go deeper in that because it’s hard as a group to form a thesis statement or very cohesive argument because we ended up doing more of a timeline than like an argumentative paper because you have to split it up.

John: Your topic specifically was on what?

Victoria: Tax-structure and income inequality. So basically, we looked at early 20th century, later 20th century, and the 21st century, and how the changing tax structures led to increasing income inequality over time. So that’s kind of how we split it up. But I think if I was to do it again, I would take a different approach to it, because I did the first section and finding information on World War One income inequality is much harder than it seems. So I struggled a lot with that too.

Charlie: Yeah, in terms of how we wrote our chapter of the book, I’m usually a fan of writing papers that follow a timeline as an explanation but that’s just a personal preference. It doesn’t work for everybody. So I can definitely see how making the cohesive argument along with following that timeline can be pretty difficult.

John: In your chapter, I think the timeline made a bit of sense. We were talking about the evolution of it and the transitions in your chapter were pretty smooth. I don’t think that worked as well in all the chapters, quite often it looked like they were three essays…

Victoria: Yes.

John: …chopped and pasted together.

Victoria: There was this one paper with a bunch of sub topics, but it wasn’t cohesive. And I was reading it and it just did not make any sense to me how it was organized. So that was one of the suggestions I made… maybe taking a step further in class and presenting maybe our papers a little earlier.

John: In more stages…

VICTORIA. I was just trying to read it and I just could not make sense of the organization of it, where maybe if we caught that earlier we maybe could have made better paper.

John: I was giving them feedback in several groups… that sort of feedback… that they need to smooth out the transitions and have a more logical structure. But some groups responded really well and did a nice job with that, other groups were a little more reluctant to do that.

Rebecca: Perhaps some groups will respond really well to some peer pressure. [LAUGHTER]

John: And having the presentations in class would have helped do that. When people in the class were saying, “This is just too disorganized.” And most of them got better by the end, but it was a stretch getting there.

Rebecca: So you’ve talked a little bit about some of the challenges, but what was really rewarding about working on this project?

Victoria: I found it really helpful to work with the group. I had Charlie and then another student, Junweii, in my group and we all read each other’s parts. I know I went through the document and made comments for my own group too. And we were all able to bring it together, make comments for each other, ask each other questions about like what sources to use especially too. And it was easier in that regard than an individual paper. Because if you make a mistake and you don’t realize it, no one’s there to help you, it’s just you. But here we have people to help each other.

Charlie: Yeah, I always find it beneficial to complete a task with other students also trying to complete the same task as you. It just makes the learning more interesting. And you’re more willing to go and spend the extra hour looking at the document to just make sure you understand what you’re writing, but also that it fits with whomever else you’re working with. I found it really beneficial or satisfying just the fact that we, like I said, could create something that any ordinary person could probably read and understand what was happening.

Maria: Yeah, I think the most rewarding part for me was just seeing that finished product and getting you know, positive feedback from Professor Kane and from my other group members. I think working in that group setting helps to motivate me to do the best of my ability. And I think it was just rewarding at the end to see everything come together well.

Victoria: I think it gave us all a deeper understanding of the material too because, instead of writing it yourself… because you can write something and not understand it. I’ve done it many times. [LAUGHTER] But when you’re sitting in a group, getting a presentation ready, you each need to understand the material. So you’re explaining what you learn to each other. And that’s something you don’t get by yourself. I found that really rewarding.

John: What about the public nature of the project? The fact that this will be out there, it will have your names on it, and it could be out there indefinitely.

Charlie: I found that portion of the project pretty intriguing and exciting. Just like I said, you can go out there, and obviously we’re college students, we’re looking for employment after this. So just showing an employer, “Hey, I’ve written something that’s been published. It’s out there, you can go read it for yourself and see what you think.” It gives something for the students to show.

Victoria: Yeah, it made it exciting because we knew what was at the end of the project. Rather than just a finished paper, we actually had something to like prove ourselves, like we did this.

Maria: I think for me, it was cool to know because at the end of the semester, I’m able to go to my family and say, “Oh, here you go. This is something that I worked on all semester long. Here’s something that you can read and you can better understand what I’ve studied for the past four years.” So I think it was helpful that I was able to show my family I’ve worked hard on this. This is something that is to show for that.

Charlie: I would definitely concur with that. Economics as a topic isn’t really discussed when you’re talking just with family members, so many of them don’t understand what you’re talking about. And you’ll try, but it’s hard sometimes. So to put something together that they’d be able to read and understand, I found that pretty satisfying.

John: And how did the class select the audience for this? What level was it written for?

Victoria: Students with a background in economics I think we decided on. But we came together as a class and decided on that. But you need economic background to understand some of the things we wrote.

John: But at an introductory level, so it wasn’t written at an advanced level. It was written for people who’ve had an economics course somewhere along the way.

Victoria: Or just no background. You don’t have to go to college to read the book.

Rebecca: How would you change this project in the future? We touched on a couple of things here and there, but do you have any other key things that, if the same exact project were presented to another group of students, how would you change the structure? Or the way it’s organized? Or the way that it’s presented the first day?

Victoria: Thinking about the class as a whole rather than just the book project, we did weekly presentations which was a lot of work in itself. So I would probably minimize those and focus on the book. Because we were sitting there reading 20+ page economic journals every week and making a presentation on it and doing the book project. So I think having more time dedicated to the book project and presenting on that material, rather than just economic journals that people have written, like it gives background, which is helpful, but maybe a little less, or maybe shorter ones, or ones that are just easier to understand. Because I know a lot of times you would say, like, “I know you guys don’t understand this, it’s challenging. But we still need to know it.” Like you would explain it in class, which would be helpful, but reading something you don’t understand is really difficult for students… in economics specifically. That’s challenging.

Maria: Yeah, I would agree. I think, at the beginning of the semester, it was a lot of work to have to juggle both the presentations and the book at the same time. So I kind of like the idea, I’m not sure if it was you Victoria, who mentioned it in class, of doing the presentation one week and then the next week working on the book and having class time devoted to the book in the week after. I think that would have been very helpful too because we did meet as groups, but if we were able to meet in a class setting than I think other classmates will be able to make comments on your chapter and offer advice. I think it would just help overall with the workload that we have.

Charlie: I also agree with that. I think the improvement can be made where we’d work on maybe a random topic every other week, and do a presentation on that, and then also incorporate the book project into that. I think it would help with the cohesiveness of the book along with just feedback and all the other problems that we had discussed.

John: One of the things I had suggested at the very beginning, you may recall, is I suggested one option is to spend the whole class focused on this. Another option is just to do it the way it was done in the past, or something else. And the class actually voted for the something else. Now having had the experience, the something else didn’t work quite as well, and that more class time should have been devoted, I think, to this and I saw that too.

Victoria: I think we’re just looking for something exciting. Like yeah, it’s a book project like we know what we’re going to do with that. But the presentations just added something else, but if I went back to a book project because then we could have taken the steps at a slower pace too, like the annotated bibliography, like the topics, we could have taken way more time with that than we did. Because once we did that very quickly, and then went into presentations, and then we just had due dates instead of meetings in class.

Maria: Yeah, I think for us, what appealed to us with this combination of the book and the presentations was that the presentations offered structure for us when we knew what we were getting with those presentations. We knew each week that we’d come in with the presentation. And I think with the book, we were excited because it was something new and different and I think we were a little too hesitant to go fully and choose the book, because we weren’t sure what we would be doing in class. We weren’t sure how we would be tested on that. So I think the combination of fields lost because we were able to have that structure, but we were also able to try something new.

Charlie: I know for some of the students in the class they had mentioned to me… they were hesitant to get rid of the presentations weekly because they were a fan of learning something new every week and learning a different topic, not just focusing on the book project. They really wanted to increase their knowledge base by just learning about multiple fields of economics. So I think that’s why we ended up going with what we went with in the end. But I think we all could all agree that if we had done that every other week, it would have been more efficient.

John: I agree. And I think some combination might be good for the reason you mentioned, but more class time devoted to it would be helpful.

Victoria: Maybe at first too, do a presentation. Like the first presentation, I don’t know what week that was, but maybe keep that one because when our group really met each other, we worked together, and then we planned a time every week where we would meet.

John: And if this is done again, and that will be if the class wants to do this in the future, perhaps that first topic for the readings could be related to whatever they choose to do so they’re actually doing some scaffolding with the presentations then.

Rebecca: I had something similar in my classes before where a team formed early on. We did something small, low stakes, to figure out how to work with each other and what doesn’t go well. So that when we did something a little more high stakes, you already knew what the wrinkles were going to be so that you could plan for that moving on. So it sounds like your presentations served that purpose, whether or not you intended that to happen or not.

John: But it became a lot of work when it was done every week, in addition to writing a book.

Victoria: That was difficult.

Maria: Yeah, I think it just helped to make us all more comfortable with each other and more comfortable speaking in front of the class.

Rebecca: So the big question is, of course, should other faculty do this?

Victoria: Yes, I’m working on my honors thesis right now, which is kind of what you would do in a traditional seminar. And it’s very difficult. So just having people there… write it with you… know what you’re talking about… You can ask them questions. In our group chat, we often ask, “What would you recommend for this part of the paper? Or what articles do you think are appropriate for this?” If you’re doing it by yourself, it’s very difficult. And the overarching topic… I feel like in a lot of seminars, they have that. It’s a topic for the seminar, but it doesn’t really filter through as well as the book project does, because we are all cohesive, all of us together working as a class of 27 people, which you never see. So, I found it really helpful and I liked it a lot. And it wasn’t like a crazy amount of work. You did the work, and you study, you did the presentations, and you wrote a paper, but it didn’t take you hours every day to work on. I feel like I learned more in this class than I have in other classes that I write individual papers for.

Maria: Well, I think I would partially agree and partially disagree with that. I think as a class, we all appreciated that Professor Kane was willing to change like the class structure and was willing to try something new. And I think that was definitely intriguing for us and provided something different as our last economic course. But I think if I had done my own topic paper, I think I probably would have learned a little bit more, I think just I would preferred that. But I think it was still important to get this experience and try something new.

Charlie: I think I would definitely suggest it to some other faculty members to maybe try this out. Like Victoria was saying, working with a group is pretty beneficial. And I feel like, from a personal standpoint, I learn more when I’m working with other people who I can ask questions to, get feedback from. Really, it helps your understanding of the class. In terms of incentive, I find that I wanted to work on the book project because you had that end goal of, “This is something that I can put out there and show to somebody.”

Victoria: Yeah, but at the same time, group work can sometimes be the worst thing that ever happens to you. Like we got really, really lucky because I know Charlie, we’re friends so we were like, “Okay, let’s work together. We’ll just get one random person.” Junwei was like such a blessing. We just work together so beautifully, but I feel like if we had someone that didn’t want to do the work… wasn’t willing to put in the work… didn’t show up to meetings… that would ruin the project for us. So I don’t know how you could fix that. But just if there’s a good group, it works. If there isn’t, I feel like it wouldn’t work as well.

Rebecca: So good to write one book during your time here, but maybe not many books. [LAUGHTER]

John: But there could be other things. For example, they could have been podcasts that were created. They could be collections of essays.They could be video projects that are put together by groups. So there’s a lot of different things that could be done.

VICTORIAL: Yeah, I would throw that out there. If you did this again with another book, like, yeah, you can write a book, but you can also do that… a different kind of form of the same kind of structure. That would be interesting.

Maria: I would be interested in doing some type of podcast because I know some of my friends in their classes have been required to do podcasts. And I feel like you have to prepare really well for that. So I think maybe that would have forced your teammates, if they weren’t doing the work, to do the work so that they wouldn’t get to the studio and not have anything to say. So I think that would have been another really cool option.

Charlie: I think it would be a good option for capstone classes, just because I know for a lot of majors, you hear what the capstone is about for the three years before you even get there. And I know personally for me, I’m also trying to get a political science degree, my capstone is next semester, like I’m already dreading the 25-page paper I’m gonna have to write. So to switch it up and have the students maybe not know exactly what they’re in for, I think it gives a little bit of an intrigue and like, “Okay, this isn’t just the I’m going to go and write a paper all year. It’s something else that I’m going to do.”

Victoria: Yeah, it’s more fun. I’m more willing to write a paper that my group members are in. Like we can all see each other too in the Google doc and talk to each other in the chat… be like, “What do you think about this part?” Or like Charlie can watch me while I’m writing my part of the paper and say, “This is good. Maybe change this. Or bring this sentence up.” You don’t do that in individual papers and even if you write an individual paper and have peer feedback, it’s not the same as having it right there, real time, or just people caring more because it’s theirs too.

John: We did have some issues with that early on though, in the first draft or two, because there were some people who really didn’t want to try using Google docs for writing. And were any of you involved in that?

Charlie: So, I’m not opposed to Google Docs. [LAUGHTER] I had just always used Word documents before. So it took a little bit of getting used to but once you commit to it, it’s a really nice thing to have in your repertoire. Google Docs, I feel like, is used by countless numbers of people, companies, places, businesses, the college. So honestly, as a student, you should just take the incentive to try to get to learn it. And once you learn it, it’s really beneficial to you.

John: One of the problems was that some people were writing in Word and then uploading it to the drive and that made it really hard for other people to edit. And eventually everyone switched over, but it did take a few iterations with some people.

Maria: So yeah, I think there were a couple of challenges with having different drafts because people made comments on separate drafts. So I think just sending out a reminder email would be helpful and letting people know because I know I think I made my changes on the wrong draft the first time and we had to send an email right away to have him fix that. So I think just having it set up all before the due dates like before you mention it in class would be really helpful too.

John: Yeah, there were some rough spots. This was new for me too.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up our podcast by asking what’s next for each of you?

Charlie: This December, I’m looking to graduate from Oswego, which is exciting for me. And after that, I’m not really sure what’s going to go on. We’ll see.

Maria: Well, I’m graduating this Saturday, and I’m going to be moving down to Florida for a little bit and doing an internship there.

Victoria: I’m also graduating Saturday and I’ll be working at HSBC this July in their graduate development program.

Rebecca: Sounds like exciting futures for each of you.

John: What are you doing in Florida? An internship where?

Maria: I’m doing the college program, the Disney College Program.

John: Oh, wonderful. Maybe I’ll see you there at the OLC conference. Well, thank you. It’s been a pleasure working with you all semester. And thank you for joining us.

Charlie: Thank you for having us.

Victoria: Thank you.

Maria: Thank you.

[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.