Category: rubrics

380. Chatbots to Support Learning

Posted in edtech, educational technology, equity, first-generation, higher education, learning, pedagogy, rubrics, teaching
February 12, 2025

Generative AI tools have made it easy to create custom chatbots. In this episode, JeVaughn Lancaster joins us to discuss the process of creating chatbots and some potential uses in higher education. JeVaughn is the Manager of Instructional Design at Lynn University. JeVaughn’s work using generative AI to support effective course design resulted in a Best in Track award at the 2024 OLC Innovate Conference. Some of her more recent work on this topic was presented at the OLC Accelerate Conference in November 2024.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Generative AI tools have made it easy to create custom chatbots. In this episode, we discuss the process of creating chatbots and some potential uses in higher education.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is JeVaughn Lancaster. She is the Manager of Instructional Design at Lynn University. JeVaughn’s work using generative AI to support effective course design resulted in a Best in Track award at the 2024 OLC Innovate Conference. Some of her more recent work on this topic was presented at the OLC Accelerate Conference in November 2024.
Welcome, JeVaughn.

Jevaughn: Hi. Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

John: It’s good to see you. I saw you at your session, which is what resulted in this invitation. So we’re really glad to have you join us. Today’s teas are:… JeVaughn, are you drinking any tea?

Jevaughn: I actually do have tea. It’s been my heart and soul for the past couple weeks, I should say. It is a ginger honey tea, but I added a splash of soursop. I don’t know how to explain what a soursop is. So you can drink just that one. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: …sounds good. I have a London Strand breakfast.

John: And today I have a Darjeeling tea.

Rebecca: So, today we invited you here to discuss your work developing GPTs to serve as chatbots that support faculty. Can you start first by describing what a custom GPT is, or maybe even what a GPT is? [LAUGHTER]

Jevaughn: Oh, yes, that is, I feel, the perfect way to start before we talk a little bit deeper in what a custom GPT is. GPT really stands for generative pre-trained transformers, and a lot of people really get that confused. But when we say generative, that’s exactly what it does. It generates content based on a multiple of things, like patterns, responses to questions. A lot of people know ChatGPT as the essay writer, [LAUGHTER] lo and behold, but that’s really generative. So it generates things. Then when it gets into the pre-trained aspect of it, it is trained by a huge data set of information that people feed into the GPT. So every time somebody enters a prompt, it continuously trains it and builds that data set to be a little bit bigger. And then the transformer part. I like to always say that the transformer part is like a multitasker, so it puts all those little data bytes and pieces together to analyze it. So it’s almost like using a learned language. It identifies a variety of patterns, and again, like I said, it’s a multitasker. So it brings in all of these bits and pieces of information and then generates the response to your prompt, making it a GPT. So with that said, a custom GPT is really dedicated to a specific task of something that you do often on a daily basis, that you just want to make your life a little bit easier so you want to customize something for your immediate needs. So I really think that’s what a custom GPT could be, in a nutshell.

John: So in order to create one of these custom GPTs, you do need a paid chatGPT account, and initially to use one, you needed a paid GPT account, but that’s changed. Are there any restrictions on the use of GPTs that others create for free users?

Jevaughn: Yeah, you’re right. So before, when someone created a GPT, in order to share that, the end user would also have to have that paid subscription. But now with the updates, it’s so easy, because what happens is that the paid user can create a GPT and then share that and as long as you have an account set up, a username and password, it doesn’t necessarily have to be paid, you’re able to then use that customized GPT.

John: So that means that instructors can create GPTs for their students, and people in professional development roles can create GPTs to share with their faculty, which is what you were presenting on there.

Jevaughn: Exactly, and I feel that it makes everything so much easier, because you have those that are really into it, and they’re creating all different types of customized GPTs on so many different topics. And then those that may not be as great with technology that they’re not really able to put these things together. However, it’s so easy to use by adding in those prompts, it’s already built and customized for whatever it is that they need, so it really makes life a little bit easier. Now, there are a couple things that a free subscription might struggle with, even when using a custom GPT, and there are a few restrictions that they have. So, for example, tokens, they won’t be able to submit as many prompts as someone else with a paid subscription. Or if there are bandwidth issues, if there’s a lot of people using ChatGPT in one instance, someone with a free account may struggle. They may have a lot of slow responses to their GPT.

Rebecca: At OLC Accelerate, you provided a presentation on creating GPTs? Could you describe the process of creating a GPT?

Jevaughn: Absolutely. Oh, my goodness, that’s the fun part. And I think a lot of people feel that it’s a lot more difficult than it really is to do. It’s so simple. So when you’re logged into your ChatGPT account, there’s a little button on the left side that says, “Explore GPTs.” Once you click on that, it’ll open up this toolbar, and on the right side, you click on it, and it says “Create.” And it has a list of prompts that you can follow along to really help you build your GPT. It’s going to ask a description. So there’s where you say this is what this custom GPT is going to do. You can keep it short, sweet and to the point, because it is what it is, it’s the description. And then after that, it’s going to ask you some instructions. So what are you going to instruct that GPT to do? And this part is really important, because it’s almost like guiding the GPT on what to do. You’re training it. And just like any other GPT model, you have to train it and you have to fine tune it and customize it to fulfill your needs. So because of that, you want to add in things like, if you’re building rubrics, what are those specific criteria that you want if you ask it for a rubric, if you’re using it for grading, you’re going to want to have to put in those specific details: “Well, I don’t want my feedback to be more than 100 words,” or “I want it to be in a nice tone.” You really have to give it these specific instructions so that your GPT will give you the output that you’re really looking for. So after you do the instructions, there’s a section called knowledge, and that part is really important, because there’s where you can do things like upload specific documentations that you want your GPT to pull from, and that’ll give you more straightforward responses. So rather than ChatGPT searching random articles or information that it finds on the internet, it’s going to first go by the knowledge you provided. It’s all part of the GPT training. So for example, at OLC, we created a GPT that was almost like a teacher’s assistant. And it was important because we found that a lot of faculty members struggle with learning objectives and how to create it and align it. So with that, we took the Bloom’s Taxonomy chart, and there’s some people that still like the old Bloom, some folks like the new Bloom’s. Then there’s the digital Blooms. So to make everyone happy, we uploaded all three [LAUGHTER], so there’s no discrepancy at all. And then there’s many specific things that you can also add in. So if you’re looking for things that have to do with universal design for learning, you can link to the UDL page from CAST. There’s so many things that you can do so it can give you that information that you want when you ask it as a prompt. So all of that is going to be built out into the knowledge section. So you’re building something that you can utilize to help you with your information. If you are conducting research, or if you’re using it to help you with research, you can link specific databases that you would use so you find those peer- reviewed articles. There’s so many things that you can do to train it, and then, hey, if you find out something’s not working, you can edit it and fix it and go back. [LAUGHTER] So after you finish adding your description and giving it your instructions, you can then also give it some talking points. You know, when you log on to ChatGPT, sometimes it’ll give you four different options. You can add in question prompts. You can do that, and then you can say, “Okay, now that we’re done, what are we going to name you?” And it’ll offer you suggestions for a name, it’ll offer you suggestions for an icon image, and you can generate it, save it, and you have your custom GPT. [LAUGHTER] Again, it’s a lot easier to accomplish than it seems.

Rebecca: I know it sounds so intimidating at first, like, make a custom GPT is like,” Ah, I’m not qualified.”

Jevaughn: Yeah, it does. It does. And then when you get into it, it’s just like, “Wow, I really just did that all by myself,” [LAUGHTER] and you can customize it down to how it’s responding to you. I have a friend and a colleague that has it sound like a Southern belle every time it responds to them. It’s amazing, the things that you can do with your GPTs. You can really customize it and personalize it.

John: And it’s really no more difficult than just interacting with ChatGPT in other ways. When would you use a custom GPT rather than just interacting directly with ChatGPT?

Jevaughn: I think if you want specific tasks done, because there’s so many times when you are working with just regular ChatGPT, you have to prompt after prompt after prompt until you really get the output that you want. If it’s a task that you’re doing 10 times a day, it’ll be more stressful sometimes, I think, in my opinion, to continuously prompt to get things down to right where you want it, rather than have this custom GPT that I can upload an assignment that I just created and say, “Hey, can I have an analytical rubric off of this and it’ll just give me the output that I need immediately with one question.

Rebecca: Are these custom GPTs less subject to hallucinations?

Jevaughn: I think so. I think that they really are, because once you feed it that information, and once you feed it that knowledge, it’s always going to pull from there first. Now, there’s something that I have noticed, when a lot of faculty members try to look for content, it’ll definitely hallucinate a lot of links. So a lot of the links are always, I feel, fictitious. You would click on it, you’d get the 404 code. You’ll get “this video no longer exists. However, if you actually search for that author, you’ll find it, 9 times out of 10 you’ll find it. So I feel that it’s definitely reduced the amount of hallucinations. And then in your custom GPT also, if there’s a database that you frequent that some people will link it to Google scholar or something that may not be behind a paywall, you’ll be able to go right to it as well. Or I’ve even suggested that with those links and titles that the GPTs might give you, log into your institution’s library and see, 9 times out of 10, you might find it there too. So yeah, in my use I’ve noticed that it reduces hallucinations.

John: Going back to your earlier response, where you suggested that it’s good for things that you might dorepeatedly, you’ve also suggested that it could be good if you want to create something that you share with others. So could you talk a little bit more about how faculty have responded to the GPTs you created to assist faculty? Have many faculty been using it, and how have they reacted to it?

Jevaughn: Oh, my goodness, my faculty absolutely love it. [LAUGHTER] They love it. And then also they’ve had suggestions to take it to the next level. It’s incredible. So first and foremost, I mentioned those pesky learning objectives. For whatever reason, it’s hard for a faculty member to think about alignment in the sense of using those specific words. They’re definitely experts in their own areas and maybe teaching and pedagogy is not one of them, so sometimes it could be a little bit more difficult. So one of the main things that all the faculty love is those learning objectives, because they can say, “Hey, I need this aligned properly.” Now, one thing that I did receive was that some faculty members noticed that when I first created it, they noticed that it wasn’t aligning to the correct course level. So maybe a 100-level class was getting “create” or something in the higher levels of objectives. So I had to go back in, I refined the GPT and say, “Hey, if a faculty member asked for 100-level, I want it to align with these levels of Bloom’s. And if it’s a 400 level, I wanted to align with these levels of Bloom’s.” So then once you regenerate it and you save it now, hey, as soon as somebody reopens the link, they’re getting all of those updates in real time, so now they’re able to help with their alignment a little bit better. So their suggestions really come in handy. I appreciate it. I listened very carefully at those.

Rebecca: Can you talk about some productive uses for GPTs to support instructors and students?

Jevaughn: Yeah, definitely. So for faculty members, I already mentioned those rubrics, there’s rubrics, and that’s such a time saver right there, because I know that that’s really my pain point when it comes to course development. So yeah, there’s a lot of things that faculty members and students can use customized GPTs for. So, for example, I’ve seen a lot of faculty members use it to create lesson plans. We have two and a half hour block scheduling, and there’s many times where some faculty members teaching four classes in a block, it’s tough sometimes for them to make sure that they have their daily lesson plans. They create timed daily lesson plans to keep them on track for their two and a half hour block. Quizze, is straightforward. You can upload a PDF chapter and say, “Hey, can you create me a quiz with 20 questions?” And you’ll be able to get those and of course, you’ll have to tweak them a little bit. I would never say, to take whatever it is that a regular GPT or a customized GPT, and just copy and paste and put it in your class. We don’t want to do that. As educators, we always want to fact check anything that any type of AI gives us. But again, it’s a time saver. You want to help save your time and your brain power to do tasks that will more benefit the students than staying and creating rubrics. [LAUGHTER] Discussion questions is a really big use case, and I’ve seen faculty members do this for both asynchronous and face-to-face classes. For the asynchronous that’s really self explanatory, but for the face-to-face classes, I’ve seen it really help the discussions flow nicer in the classroom, because now, if the faculty member is discussing an article or a chapter, they take that same article, run it through ChatGPT, and they ask for discussion questions. And it really helps enhance the course, because they get brand new course discussion questions every day, or if they’re teaching it multiple times throughout that block, each class has a different question and a different discussion, which really, really helps. Feedback and grading, I already talked about that. A big use case is accessibility needs. Now accessibility is growing, and UDL, we preach all the time, and there’s many times where you just can’t figure out how to make an assignment accessible, but you can get those suggestions from ChatGPT as well. Now, on the student side of it, it’s awesome because students can use it as tutors. And I know that I was telling them at OLC that I created a custom GPT for my son in math, and it’s just an adaptive learning so it’ll provide, depending on how you create it, the one that I have will provide multiple questions, and he’ll have to answer it, and if he gets it wrong, it’s adaptive. So it’ll break the question apart and say, you got this part correct, this part correct. But let’s focus more on this step, and it’ll take him on a step-by-step journey. And then after he completes 20 questions, he gets a report, a spreadsheet saying all the ones he got correct, all the ones he got incorrect, and it showed him the steps of where. So really good for student tutoring. Another thing is research help. It definitely is great for students. I’m a dissertation chair myself, and I help the students use AI to leverage their work. So I just had a student that had Zoom focus groups and interviews, so the ChatGPT was able to transcribe the audio, it was able to create pseudonyms for each attendee, so it’ll help the privacy, and it was able to pull out themes, so now the student is able to spend that brain power on other parts of the research and that content really and not spend hours of time trying to transcribe items. It’s really interesting, and I feel that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so many things, so many different use cases that all of these GPT models can do.

John: In terms of creating a tutor, one of the first things I did after seeing your session was I created a tutorial for my intro micro economics course, because the book I’m using is tied to an OER textbook. So I could upload the whole textbook to it and ask them to use it, and also have it ask students initially, what they know about the topic, ask them what they have questions about and then have them ask their question, but then guide them to an answer, rather than directly answering the question. And it works remarkably well. And because it’s trained just on the textbook that I’m using, I haven’t seen any substantial hallucinations. And so far, it’s been working well.

Jevaughn: It’s incredible when you’re able to really dive so deep, to be so specific, and accomplish those things with AI. And I mean, I can even say after one of the faculty members created a GPT focusing only on assignments, so he has the GPT assign students, I think it was like six different research papers, and what happens is that everything is uploaded into that knowledge base, and then from levels easy, mid, difficult, by difficulty, and then once the student enters their name, it will never give the students the same assignment twice, and it will always give the student one of each level of difficulty depending on what week of instruction they’re in. It’s amazing how far and how creative everyone has become customizing these GPTs.

John: Should we be careful in uploading information about our students in terms of personal information? Might perhaps we want to use pseudonyms or something else for students so that they’re not being trained on information specific to individual students?

Jevaughn: Absolutely. Yeah, data privacy is really, really important, especially when we’re talking about students, because we have to be so careful. Remember, anything, especially if you’re not in a paid account that you upload to ChatGPT is then used to train future models and versions of it. However, what I found out is that according to ChatGPT now, both the free version and the paid version allows you to say if you’re okay with sharing your data or not. On the Settings icon, there’s a data control button, and one of the options under data control is to improve the model for everyone. Now, if that is turned on, they’re taking all of the data that you put in and using that to train but if you turn it off, it won’t share your data, and it’ll delete those conversations, so it won’t share anything. Now is that 100%? I don’t know. Who knows? Personally, I don’t 100% trust it, so I don’t feel like I would ever upload actual student data, God forbid, financials or anything like that, but I would still be careful on it, but that’s just an added step of security to turn that off and make sure that you’re not sharing or you’re not giving them the right to use whatever information that you upload.

Rebecca: It also seems like if we’re having students using GPTs in our class, that talking about data privacy and things might be a topic that we might want to cover with our students. You want to talk a little bit about ways to maybe do that with students?

Jevaughn: Absolutely, and I think that really goes with the whole topic of AI literacy. I always recommend to faculty members that, hey, number one, if you’re going through some of these information sessions and you’re learning how to use AI in your classroom and you’re using AI to create those discussion questions, let’s teach the students the proper way of also using AI ethically in their academic work. So I think that a conversation that should be had. I’m sure that high schoolers are already having those conversations. I know that my son, who’s in 11th grade, definitely is with his teachers, but I think that that’s a conversation not only to have right on entry when the students are entering the institutions, but constantly, it should be everywhere. It should be in the syllabus. It should be in that very first class of every semester. You want to make sure that students are aware that whatever it is they upload is fair game unless they protect themselves. I mean, we had to have those conversations with social media also. So I feel like this is just the next layer.

Rebecca: What’s your advice to instructors about disclosing their own use of AI to their students?

Jevaughn: I think it’s important, because I feel that students are really less motivated to use it for non practical purposes. [LAUGHTER] If they know that their instructor is using it as well, they know that their instructor is well versed in the use of AI, they’ll be careful, and they’ll be very focused on their content, rather than putting in a prompt and submitting it. My advice to faculty members is always, “Hey, you can go ahead and disclose that you’re using AI, but also give your students the opportunity to focus their brain power on what you feel is more important.” So my example is that, for me, I’m all about the content. I want to make sure that my students know the content, forward, backward with their eyes closed. I want them to know that, however, if there’s a presentation, go ahead and use AI to create that PowerPoint. I can care less as long as you know that content, you can focus that brain power on solidifying that content and using AI as an assistant for you. And I feel like that would be one of the better use cases, or the better discussion that a faculty member can have with their students rather than saying, edit your paper using ChatGPT.

John: One concern that a lot of faculty members have is that students may be using this as a substitute for learning instead of as an assistant for learning. What can we do to encourage students to use AI to facilitate their learning and not to short circuit that learning?

Jevaughn: Yeah, I think that it will really enhance the overall conversation and relationship between the student and the faculty member, because now the student is able to go off on their own and ask all of these questions of inquiry to their GPTs and then come back to their faculty member, or their professor, and say, “Hey, so I was thinking about x, y, z, and this is what I found.” So now the faculty member would have the responsibility of saying, Oh, my goodness, this is wonderful. Let’s discuss it more, and it’ll help the student boost his confidence, or the faculty member can say “Mmmm, you don’t have that quite right. Where did you find your information? Let’s figure this out now together that you’ve already went out on your own to try to ask the question.” And I feel that these days, a lot of students are lacking that wow moment in their educational career. I think most of us just had a wow moment that’s memorable. It’s always important to make some type of learning memorable, and I think a lot of students are losing that. And I think a lot of students, and maybe even faculty members, are losing that even more with all of these AI, but if we have the ability to let the students go fish and learn on their own without having that negative point against them saying, oh my goodness, I’m using AI, am I a terrible person? Rather than helping the students utilize it the right way. That might just be their moment of making that educational moment memorable for the student, because you’re now on their level in how you can adapt to their educational needs. And I think that’s really important.

John: And our students come in with really diverse prior learning. And one benefit of AI is it provides an opportunity to bring everybody up to a higher level, because it can address their specific needs. It’s available 24 by seven, and it allows students to get help when they need it, where they need it, on the specific concepts and topic they need, as long as they’re not doing that as an alternative to actually learning. So with every aspect of AI, there’s some really strong positives, but there’s also some really serious concerns, and I think we all have a lot to learn about how to use this effectively, but for me, at least, it strikes me as being really silly to try to ignore AI and assume that this is not an issue we need to deal with, because students are going to be working with AI in some form for the rest of their lives, and not preparing them for that world strikes me as being not particularly helpful for our students.

Jevaughn: Yeah, I agree. At this point, we’ve all realized that it’s not going anywhere, it’s going to evolve [LAUGHTER] and move on to so many different things. So we have to be adaptable to technology. AI, it’s updating as we speak. [LAUGHTER] It’s learning more and more as we speak.

Rebecca: And I think that one of the things that really strikes me is that you were pointing out motivating curiosity, and when someone is indicating that they were curious, to not smash it, regardless of whether or not their curiosity led to a correct answer. And I think one of the things that I’ve experienced with students, even prior to the surge of AI is that sometimes when students are asking questions, even when they were just Googling answers, is the way that they were asking the question was where their misconception lies. And so sometimes having inquiries about how they were asking the question, or how they were using AI to answer their own questions could be an interesting way to engage with students, and opening the GPT and exploring with them could be a great exercise to do with students.

Jevaughn: Absolutely and having these types of discussions with our librarians, I found out, and I didn’t know this until maybe right before that conference in November, [LAUGHTER] that actually, when you’re working with APA and student writing, it’s an APA requirement that the student attach the entire conversation with the GPT as an appendix. And that part I didn’t realize. So if the student puts in their paper and say, I want this. I want that, they have to include every word of it so they can’t delete those conversations. I was floored by that. I had no idea. I’m like, well, that’s interesting. I never knew that APA required that, but according to our librarians, they do,

Rebecca: But also not a bad thing for faculty to request. Sometimes, if we’re asking students to use AI or use a GPT as a way to get to an answer to use as a learning tool to show their work, it’s something they can save. [LAUGHTER]

Jevaughn: It’s true, and most institutions use tools like Grammarly, and I know that a lot of our faculty members require students to check their work through Grammarly to make sure that the grammar and punctuation. But then there’s the new Grammarly, where it does just that. It records every keystroke that the students are typing to say, “the students typed this,” this part came from AI, this part was copied and pasted from this website, and all of the rest of it seems to be human text. And then the students can create a share link and share it with their instructor, and you see it in real time as the students are drafting their papers. It’s amazing. I mean, AI has come such a long way from where most people think it began two years ago. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Feels a little creepy, but okay. [LAUGHTER]

John: AI has been going on for decades, and it was always something that was going to happen soon, and then all of a sudden, it arrived, way before anyone expected anything this powerful to be released with an interface so friendly.

Jevaughn: Yeah, no warning, just boom, here we are. [LAUGHTER]

John: …right before finals.

Jevaughn: Yes, yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Alright, so I always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Jevaughn: As far as AI [LAUGHTER] or GPTs is concerned, I think about it all the time, again, from where it started to where it is now. I was just reading where there’s a K-12 school in Colorado that has two-hour intensive AI instruction, and it’s completely done by AI, the instruction, the curriculum, everything, and the rest of the day it focuses on life skills, which, to be honest, that’s dwindling a little bit with all of the gaming and all the other technologies, there’s got to be a gap somewhere. So focusing on life skills isn’t bad, but I think in the near future, I feel that we’ll see a lot of enhancements when it comes to that data security, because it’s such a hot topic right now. We’re already doing so much with accessibility, but I think that’s going to be a huge push when it comes to AI and ethics and the ethical concerns behind it. Who is actually behind those keys training. So we really have to think about that. And honestly, I feel that’s where it’s going. Of course, it’s going to advance when it comes to the databases and the types of knowledge that it provides, but I think in the near future, we’ll see a lot of ethical concerns and a lot of data privacy concerns being targeted.

John: Well, thank you. This has been a fascinating conversation, and your presentation inspired me to start creating GPTs because, at the time, I didn’t realize that free users could access them. But now that that’s there, it opens up so many possibilities for supporting students and for supporting instructors and anybody more broadly. So it’s a really nice improvement.

Jevaughn: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s so exciting of where we’re going.

Rebecca: Thanks for a great conversation. And it really is important for folks to understand that it really isn’t that hard to create them. It sounds really scary and really intimidating, but it really isn’t.

Jevaughn: Yeah, the platform is already built for you. You just have to feed in that information. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you. This has been great.

Jevaughn: Thank you guys so much for having me. So much fun.

[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]

342. Infographics

Posted in attention, authentic learning, engagement, feedback, higher education, learning, pedagogy, peer review, rubrics, teaching
May 22, 2024

When papers and projects are due at the end of the term, students often procrastinate even when the projects are carefully scaffolded. In this episode, Michelle Kukoleca Hammes joins us to discuss how a series of infographic assignments, combined with peer and instructor feedback, provide an engaging and productive learning experience. Michelle is an associate professor of political science and a CETL Fellow for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at St. Cloud State University.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: When papers and projects are due at the end of the term, students often procrastinate even when the projects are carefully scaffolded. In this episode, we discuss how a series of infographic assignments combined with peer and instructor feedback provide an engaging and productive learning experience.

[MUSIC]

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Michelle Kukoleca Hammes. Michelle is an associate professor of political science and a CETL Fellow for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at St. Cloud State University. Welcome, Michelle.

Michelle: Hi. Nice to be here.

John: We’re looking forward to talking to you. Today’s teas are:… Michelle, are you drinking tea?

Michelle: I am. I don’t always drink tea, but I made sure this morning I did. And so I’m actually just drinking a green tea, a milk tea. It’s not quite as good as others I’ve had. I have a colleague from Wales who makes the best green tea, but it’s good this morning.

John: …and Rebecca?

Rebecca: I have a Hunan Noir Tea, which is very tasty.

John: You left out the Pinot.

Rebecca: I know. [LAUGHTER]

John: Okay. And my tea is a black raspberry green tea.

Michelle: Sounds nice.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today, Michelle, to discuss how you’ve been using infographic assignments in your online comparative politics classes. When you first started teaching this course, what kinds of assignments did you use?

Michelle: I use a variety of assignments. I’ve been teaching this course for 27 years now. And then this is mainly for my intro level comparative course. But I’ve adapted it for upper levels too, so mainly traditional assays early on. As I moved to the online environment, I would still have them do a major paper of a country study. And so pretty traditional assignments for the most part, but I wanted to make some changes for the online environment especially.

John: So what made you decide to change to infographics?

Michelle: Well, a few things. One is I felt that students were doing these papers that were quite lengthy in their country studies, and they would turn them in at the end of the semester. And we never really had a chance to talk about the elements of them in depth prior to that. And so I really wanted to change that. So it wasn’t just the end of the semester. And they weren’t sharing them with each other, because of the format of them as just being a lengthy paper, it wasn’t the kind of thing that they would be interested in exchanging with each other. And then frankly, I was getting a little bored, [LAUGHTER] the format, not so much the content or their insights, but the format just became very boring. We all know that when you’re working with one individual paper, it can be really exciting to have that dialogue with the student. But when you have a stack of papers, it suddenly becomes too daunting. And so I was just looking for a way to make us all happier, actually.

Rebecca: That sounds like a good motivation. [LAUGHTER] Can you talk a little bit about what the infographic assignment is?

Michelle: So I will talk about in terms of that intro level comparative politics class. One of the things that there’s not time to do in any semester is to really cover every country in the world, obviously. First of all, I wanted to make sure that students could pick their own country that they have an interest in, and that would broaden the number of countries we would cover. And then I switched it to infographic for the online component because there were a few things I wanted to do with it. One is to retain the goals I had in mind for them learning about a country. But also then I wanted to tie in some best practices for online presence in the classroom, for example. My discussions, I was also unsatisfied at the beginning, we learn as we go along, and my discussions tended to also be maybe a little stale, or I’d throw out a question and I would get very similar answers from everybody. They were going back to the textbook and giving me something rather than being creative or energetic in their own answers. And so the way the infographic works is I have about 10 through the semester that they have to do. And so it’s basically breaking up the country study into smaller pieces, so that they have different topics as we go along the different topics in the class. And then before they submit them to me, they submit them into the discussion for the appropriate week. And that way, all the other students can see them, it gives them a lot of different skills. One is that they are able to critique other people’s work, they are gaining more knowledge about a variety of countries. It allows them to practice skills on their own in terms of working together. So I don’t see these always as only individual assignments, although that’s how they’re graded, but kind of a group work assignment that they can all enhance each other. And so there were a lot of ways in which I wanted to bring different elements into the same assignment, particularly because I didn’t want to have to think of how to bring these elements in and do different assignments for each thing I wanted to bring into the classroom. Having one assignment that was consistent really helped them.

Rebecca: It sounds like by having a consistent assignment, you do have to learn how to do the assignment over and over again, that part of it is covered. You do it one time and then it’s clear how to do the assignment and then you can focus on the content and the material.

Michelle: Yeah, exactly. And one of the other things is, unlike just having one country study at the end, there was a lot more formative assessment that could go into it. So exactly that, where we’re able to help build skills up early on. Some of the content early on is pretty simple. The first one is making an infographic about the demographics of the country. And so it’s pretty simple, but it allows them to get the first skills if they’ve never used, for example, Canva, or other programs that allow them to make an infographic. So they get their feet wet with that. It allows them to think about how to communicate in a different way other than a paper, because I also began to think about my intro level students who many would become political science majors, but many wouldn’t. And so in a course that they were using for general education, they’re not going to be writing political science research papers. And so allowing them in different ways to express themselves I felt was another skill that they could bring.

Rebecca: It was nice to see this scaffolding, separating out some of the technical skills from the content, because often we’re doing all of those things at once. And it sometimes can be unclear whether or not it’s a technical skill that is lacking or the lack of understanding of something. So separating those out of it really does seem like it would help have a clearer sense of where students are. And, as we know, [LAUGHTER] if you try to ask students to do too many things in one bigger assignment, then certain things end up edited out. And that might be the thing that was really critical. So it’s nice to have those separate assignments to focus in on those.

Michelle: Yeah, exactly. And I really enjoy the fact that, rather than focusing on grading a long paper, I’m able to go through that process with them. And then also in discussions, it gives me so many opportunities to re-teach something. So if I’m noticing in someone’s infographic that they’ve made an error, or they have a misunderstanding of a concept we’re working with, then all the students in the class can see me correcting that and doing it in a gentle way, that seems a little bit less high stakes for students that because it is just this one assignment, and I’m making this one little correction here, but I think it benefits everybody.

John: So for those students who haven’t done much work with infographics or with graphics in general, do you provide any instructions or recommendations to them? You mentioned Canva, do most students use that? Or is it a mix of tools?

Michelle: They usually do end up using Canva, because that is one of the tools that I put in the directions. And so I have quite lengthy directions in terms of guiding them through accessing technology, allowing them to know that they can use various different technologies, depending on their accessibility to them. There are some really great programs that of course, cost money or pro versions. But I let them know that for our purposes, they can certainly just download a free version of a program. They could really even do it in the Microsoft Office Suite in a variety of ways if that’s where their skills lie. And of course, that’s something that all the students have access to on campus. And so I do get them lengthy directions, they’re not all my directions. I don’t feel like I need to reinvent the wheel. So I just include several videos from YouTube that talk about how to use Canva. And those are sufficient and actually probably better than I can do. And so I put those out there with other directions, I give them alternatives. And then of course, if they’re still stuck, then they can always work through it with me. We can have a Zoom meeting where they pull up their materials, and we work on putting it together.

Rebecca: You mentioned that students were sharing infographics with each other, it sounded like maybe through a learning management system or something. Can you talk a little bit more about what that sharing looks like and the kind of feedback that students are giving one another.

Michelle: So the learning management system we use here is D2L Brightspace, and there is of course, like in most learning management systems, there’s that built in discussion feature, so I just use what’s already there. I don’t mind using third-party applications., but it just tends to make things trickier. So I just use the discussion. Have them post it right to the discussion, and have them use the discussion tools, whether it be just typing in or using some audio or other tools to give feedback to each other. And I find that the discussions are so much more lively. Even more than I expected. The first time I used it, it was for a summer class and I thought “okay, I’m gonna try this now because it’s summer, and no one wants to be sitting writing a 20-page paper in summer. What am I going to do?” So I put it out there for the summer class and I thought, Okay, well, maybe they’re busy with other things or they’ve got excitement in their own life over the summer or they’re working a lot of hours. I had never had such lengthy discussions go on in any class before that. They really enjoyed looking at each other’s work rather than just from me. Many of the students chose countries that reflect an interest they have, maybe it’s somewhere that they’re actually from, although I usually try to encourage them to broaden a little bit. But that also brings such a benefit to the rest of the students. So we do have students who do that. I have students who maybe have gone on vacation somewhere or have a family connection somewhere, I’ve had some that have been stationed in the military, and come back, and they want to talk about what they noticed when they were there, so they put a lot of that in the infographics. I found just use the basic tool, but allow it to be opened up for them. And I also try in discussion, and I do this even in other discussions that I have online, because I usually try to hang back for the first bit, quite a bit. I allow that to be organic. And then I’ll go in and make sometimes just a summary of everything that’s been said or things that I need to correct. So that it’s not simply another lesson from me. But I have that ability to correct when I need to.

John: You mentioned the first infographic assignment had them work with demographic data and display that, to what extent are these assignments tied to the specific course work that you’re doing during each of the 10 assignments?

Michelle: For most of those 10, they’re directly tied to the material for the week. So for example, the textbook will have a chapter where we’re talking about government structures, presidential systems, parliamentary systems, et cetera. And so the infographic for that week will be directly related. So they’re going to do an infographic laying out the government structure. And then another module will be on political parties and how they work in various parts of the world. And so it’ll be directly tied to: “So show me your country, and show me the main political parties in your country. Tell me what their main ideology is. Tell me who’s in power now… which party? And what does that mean for the policies that get put forward?” Another one would be one on current events, the last one that they do is: “Well, what’s going on there now? …and “With everything you know about your country now, what do you predict for the future for them? How do you think they’re gonna solve this?” So a little bit more policy oriented… also, “look at what they’re actually doing in terms of legislation and implementation.” And I also do one… I don’t use the textbook anymore, but it’s something I used years ago that I retained the content in a module, which is to look at the concerns of any country in terms of every country’s concern with prosperity, security, and stability. And so I asked them to just put out an infographic that asks them to assess threats to those things, and looking at their country. And so it’s a little bit on the current events side, but it’s focused for them in terms of every country needs to be aware of its security… what’s happening?

Rebecca: You’ve hinted that students are really engaged in these assignments because of discussion forums. But can you elaborate on just the general sense of what students have been able to accomplish by shifting to this format, and also their engagement with one another?

Michelle: I think, several things, some of which I’ve mentioned. So the formative assessment part, I think they gain a lot from not just getting comments at the end of the semester, oftentimes handed in that last week. And then, frankly, I don’t expect that every student has even read my comments at that point. So just having the opportunity to fully engage throughout the entire semester, and so we’re not also dealing with, “Oh, I have three days before this paper is due. So let me think about it today, make a plan to think about it more tomorrow, [LAUGHTER] and then maybe I’ll do it the next day before it’s actually due.” And not that that’s all students, but I know when I was an undergrad that happened to me. So I think that just slowing them down, allowing them space to actually think about their country in multiple ways, and not have it be “Okay, we’re all working to doing your own country study at the end of the semester,” but having them actually engaged the whole time, I think is of great benefit to them. And I think they learn a lot more. I think that taking it in these smaller chunks, actually has made them research a little bit deeper on each of the topics because they’re not overwhelmed with “Okay, I’ve got all of these topics now to cover in this country study.” And so they tend to just do it in a way that is most efficient for them, let’s say. And so I think this gives them that way to back up a little bit and actually enjoy the process of learning rather than the process of an assignment only.

John: I think you’ve made a really good point there about students’ tendency to procrastinate. I was thinking back to when I was an undergraduate, and actually a graduate student as well. And I can’t recall a single time when I didn’t start writing the paper the day before it was due. I spent a lot of time gathering materials, taking notes, and organizing and putting an outline together, but the writing generally took place in just one day. So, [LAUGHTER] this is forcing students to engage in a little bit more spaced practice, to engage with the material regularly, and I think there’s a lot of benefits over that rather than the traditional way of just rushing through and getting it done right before it’s due.

Michelle: Yeah, exactly. And I’ve adopted that in other classes too, the idea of doing a lot of prewriting throughout the semester. So I’m a big believer in the prewriting process, and it’s very valuable, and it is doing work. But when I mentioned earlier, sort of they spend the day thinking about it, I’m thinking more of myself as an undergraduate thinking about not the assignment, but thinking about the fact I have to do an assignment.[LAUGHTER] So it’s more anxiety, not so much productive work on the content of what I’m doing. And so yeah, the prewriting work for any assignment is really great. So I’ve been trying to shift that mindset. I also teach a research methods course in my department and I teach our senior seminar. And so the senior seminar, especially, just making it about an entire semester-long process, I think, has taken a lot of pressure off of them. They seem a little relieved by the end, it’s not as daunting,

Rebecca: It definitely seems like it deepens the study and the engagement, not just because it’s broken into smaller pieces, but because it’s a consistent country the whole time and because it’s a consistent kind of assignment the whole time, it really provides a structure to be able to do that. I’m curious whether or not any of your other colleagues have also shifted to doing assignments in this format, or other similar kinds of strategies.

Michelle: I can’t really say. I know that in my department, we’ve talked about them a lot. And so I think people are adapting parts of them. I don’t think anybody does it the full way that I’ve described in terms of the full semester, but we have talked about just different ways of communicating. I think that’s going to shift again, obviously, AI is something that everybody is grappling with how to best use. So I think there’ll be some shifts coming. But I can tell you that I was Interim Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and now I’m a faculty fellow there. And I’ve talked to a lot of people across campus, and some of our off-campus partnerships about this assignment, because I get really excited about it. If you haven’t noticed, this is my favorite thing. And so I’ve talked to a lot of people, and I just can’t be sure how many have actually applied some of these things. But they certainly seem interested, and they’re certainly searching out the same types of things I was searching out: how to make things, first of all, more authentic for the students, how to engage the students more with themselves in an asynchronous class or with other students. Even in a synchronous class or on-the-ground class, you could still have the same assignments. You might want to introduce them differently, you might want the discussions to take place in the classroom, rather than obviously online, because you could engage in person that way. So you can do kind of a round robin around the room, maybe… any of those techniques. But I also let the students know that, for them, they will become a mini expert by the end on that particular country. So they should all understand the topic areas but. becoming an expert on the individual countries that’s all their own. And so I hope that colleagues, no matter what field they’re in, can find some way to utilize that. Otherwise, they’re probably just a little sick of hearing me talk about it. [LAUGHTER]

John: Speaking of fellow faculty, has anyone else shifted to using infographics at your institution as a result of your work with us?

Michelle: Yeah, I can’t be quite sure. But I do think that in talking to a lot of faculty that they are shifting modes of communication for students, and I have talked to people who are much more expert at creating infographics themselves. You can do it very, basically, but you can also get really creative and high level with it. And so I oftentimes collect infographics I see for other fields, so I share those with faculty. I’m not sure. It’s one of those things that I so appreciate a podcast like this because sometimes teaching can be a lonely endeavor. We’re a little bit maybe shy about sharing what we do, because we’re afraid it’s not measuring up necessarily to what others are doing. So it’s a good question, though, and I think that that’s something that maybe I want to engage… maybe in a workshop in the future on campus and bringing faculty in and seeing who’s doing this type of thing, or maybe another brand new idea that’s even better.

Rebecca: I think one question that often comes up from faculty when we’re talking about kind of alternative formats or unessays or other [LAUGHTER] ways of not necessarily doing a more traditional essay kind of assignment, is how you evaluate the work. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how you’re evaluating these assignments, just to give faculty a sense of what that might look like and what that feels like in comparison to a more traditional kind of assignment?

Michelle: Yes, that’s a great question. I’ve talked in many ways about why I did these assignments in terms of just making it a more engaging process. But in terms of measurable, assessable goals, I do use rubrics, and have laid out exactly what skills I’m assessing. So I do have a section of the rubric that is based on the skills of communication. I have a very low stakes, low number line for things just like visual engagement, because I don’t want it to be students worried about the visual engagement when they need to learn the political science concepts. but I want to let them know that that’s important. So I have in the rubric descriptions in each of the columns about visually engaging: Does it bring the reader in? Is it easy to read? So I have that skill section, I have a section specifically on the content itself: Do they understand the concepts? Are they using the language that we use in political science? And then I also have sections for pretty typical traditional looking at their writing and seeing if it’s appropriate writing levels, tell them take a look at other people’s infographics… go out in the world and look at the bottom, there will be the sources, you need to include those, you need to not leave those off. So even practice that they would get in papers about citing things, if they put a graph in, you still have to say where this graph came from. So the practice that they would normally get are the same skills. And so I just lay it out in a rubric for them, as I do with most of my assignments. Of course, the rubric is not secret to the students, that goes out with the very first assignment: this is what you should be looking for. I’m going to use it for grading, you can simply use it as a checklist. You can use it to evaluate other students and give them feedback and tell them where you think there could be improvement. And so I think that the assessment itself is pretty typical to what I would normally do when thinking about an assignment: What are my goals for the course? How does this assignment help to meet those goals? And then how do I convey to the students whether or not they’re meeting those goals? Or essentially where they’re at in the process of becoming expert in that goal.

John: Do you use one rubric for all the assignments? Or are there separate ones for each of the infographic assignments?

Michelle: So I’m a big believer in constructing the outline once and then using it, but having different content in it. And so I use the same basic rubric for each of the assignments. And then I give the feedback in that content area really is the main portion. In the content area, I will make some changes to what they need to do specific for that assignment. So if it’s political parties, I would have expectations about what types of things they’d understand about political parties. And so that will change but my basic outline of what that looks like. And I’m a big believer in that kind of consistency in everything. So I can tell you I do that also with just how I set up the modules. And so my modules always have the same outline. There’s an intro with the learning outcomes for that specific module: what can you expect to learn this week, then the section with textbook readings. So this is what you’re going to dig into and read in a very traditional way. Then there’s a whole separate content section, which might be a video I’ve created, it might be videos that I found online that they should be engaging in. And then I usually have a pre-test and post-test quiz, and then the assignment for the week. And in this case, always associated with that assignment discussion. And then always at the end, I have a section, another discussion, which is I just call “Ask the professor,” And it’s another space for it. I always have to tell them every time I put the same heading and I say, “Don’t ask personal questions here, [LAUGHTER] but if you have a question that everyone can benefit from on the topic this week.” So that’s just an example of how I feel that it just makes it easier for me to focus on what’s in each of those boxes, rather than recreating the format. And I think students really take a lot of comfort in knowing after a couple of week: this is the rhythm, this is what I’m expected to do. And so now they’re focused on different content, but they don’t have to relearn a different set of skills. So going back to your question about the rubric, and is it the same? I do that because then they get used to what skills they’re bringing, and then they can hone that same skill over time, they can go back and look at their rubric grading and see their improvement over time. And I’m also a liberal user of the comment section on rubrics. I know that a lot of people tout rubrics for the time-saving part of it. So oh, you can check these boxes, and it makes it easier. And there’s some of that. But I can’t stop myself from also than opening up that box and just writing a ton of things to them. So I think that, again, it’s one of those things where the rubric itself becomes a really good outline. And then it’s just a matter of what I choose to put into my grading when I do the rubric.

Rebecca: High structure is always helpful for folks, that’s for sure.

Michelle: That’s very reassuring.

Rebecca: I feel like there’s a story behind why infographics as opposed to something else. What led you to infographics as opposed to some other alternative format?

Michelle: So like I said, I’ve been at this 27 years, so maybe I’m just getting old, but I feel myself saying in my head: “Well, kids nowadays don’t have the attention span for writing a 20-page paper.” And that’s not necessarily true. But as I talked about before, maybe they just have to be taken through that process. It can’t be just one big thing. And that was long before the internet, people talking about decreased attention spans. But I do think there’s something to matching up with the way in which they use visuals in their daily life. So they utilize memes, they look at infographics in various formats, I find a lot of them in social media in different areas. So I try to structure discussions in a way that is very much like the way they’re already engaging on social media. So yeah, the story is really how could I find a way that it’s something that their mind is already used to, that they can then apply it in this way. And also the other story, my husband is the County Administrator here in our county. And so I was in his office one day, I was the Assistant County Administrator and I was in his office one day and from the League of Minnesota cities, they had an infographic, a stack of them on the front table about: what does county government do? And that was really the last push I needed because it was so well done. And I thought, “Okay, this is what we need, people need to understand what levels of government do.” People often come to the county with situations that have nothing to do with what counties are actually able to do for them, and so what does your county do? What can it do for you? And I just thought, “How brilliant is that? To put it in that way.” And so I just really was sold on on the idea that infographics can really be fairly deep teaching, if they’re done well. We get so used to the academy and everything has to be these long papers, but rather than bemoaning the fact that the attention span has gone away, I’m just finding a way to adapt to that. So how do students engage with each other? And let’s make that happen.

John: And I would imagine students are more likely in the future to be creating infographics than they are to be writing 20-page papers unless they’re going on to graduate study.

Michelle: Yes, absolutely. That was the other part of it is that this wasn’t really authentic… the 20 page paper… particularly in that intro, liberal education, general education course. That was not authentic to what they were going to be doing. And I felt that in political science, if they were going to be political science majors, they would get that deep research component in other courses and upper-level courses in their capstone. And so I felt that it wasn’t necessary to put them through a 20-page paper. And the reason I keep saying 20 pages is because I realized that the amount of content you need in the country study is pretty lengthy to really understand the country, and so it really was about 20 pages, I just felt that that wasn’t engaging to people, no one was engaging each other with a 20-page paper. And so it had to be something that you could look at more quickly, you have to have the skill of condensing the material, you really had to be really pithy with how you were presenting the material so that someone can get it in a very quick way. And so I feel that allowed them to engage. And then even if you assigned a student to engage with another student’s 20-page paper, pair them off, have them do peer evaluation, they weren’t going to do more than one at that length. Maybe if you cut it down to a 10-page paper, you could have them have a group where they exchange it among three or four people, but that’s still not as big as I’m able to get by having everybody in a class post their infographics so that you can all see huge variety of work in the span of scrolling through normal social media. And of course, I’m asking to do a little bit more, but in some ways, it’s almost that they don’t even notice that part of it because they’re just scrolling through and saying: “oh…” Comments that I get most on the first assignment have to do with “Oh, I’m so glad you chose to do that country, I’ve always wanted to go there. Have you ever been? …because it looks so interesting.” So it doesn’t start out as this deep political discussion. But because of those comments in the first week, I’m convinced of the engagement that starts to come from it. One part that I didn’t mention is I also put in the directions, that if they want to add something, like a fun fact, about the country on any of these infographics, they should, and I’m surprised at how many students then choose to do that on every single one of the infographics at the bottom. There’s a fun fact. And I’ve been amazed by what they’ve come up with. There are things that I don’t know about these countries. I thought, “this is fun.” So I do think that students take to it, they want to show other students their country, they want to say, “Hey, I learned this thing. Isn’t this cool?” And then I get to learn things I didn’t know.

Rebecca: Sounds like a great way to build community and to have a first interaction with a discipline, which sometimes can be off putting. And this sounds like a really positive way to get people interested in a discipline as well.

Michelle: Yeah, I think so, and I hope so. I hope that that does make students more likely to maybe take an upper level, look at us as a minor or major. And I will say, talking so positively about this assignment, because it’s worked so well. But I can also talk to you in a podcast about all the assignments that haven’t worked well, that I don’t get this excited about, that I can’t say were this level of success. And so when we were talking about coming on the podcast, I wanted to highlight this one, because of course, it’s the success. I wanted to show what has actually worked. But, of course, there’s a lot of ones that haven’t. So I do feel that I’ve hit on something here that can be very useful, that I’ve been really satisfied with, and my students seem to be really satisfied with.

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

Michelle: So that is a great question. I’ve been thinking about that for a while. How do I take this to the next level? So I think one thing that’s next is sharing this out more. We’ve talked a few times about looking at other faculty and seeing if they would adopt something similar to this. So I think that’s one aspect. I think another aspect is to just continue to refine the assignment in a way that gets the most student engagement. I’d also like to see these assignments, if we can have them maybe printed for my asynchronous online classes. This particular class I teach mainly online now, I rarely teach it in the classroom another colleague has those sections. And so, right now, it’s simply archived either as the students own individual file, or in D2 L. And so I’d like to think about ways in which maybe we can archive them, maybe print out them in poster form and have them in the department so that people can maybe again, engage, get interested, a student walking by who’s not in political science who’s hanging out in the hallway waiting for their next class to begin, and starts reading the stuff on the walls and start saying, “Oh, that’s kind of interesting,” and maybe starts to get engaged. So looking at it outside of the particular classroom, I think would be a really exciting way to go with it.

John: Well, thank you. I’ve really enjoyed hearing more about these assignments. And I think it’s something that could work in many disciplines.

Michelle: Yeah, I hope so. And exciting for me would be now to sit back and kind of watch what other people do with it. And oh, okay. I hadn’t thought of that. That’s really cool. That’s always the most exciting part for me from the CETL angle is really just seeing how people take off with something in a way that I wouldn’t expect. And it’s been a pleasure talking with both of you.

Rebecca: I always love a good conversation about interesting assignments. So thanks for chatting with us and sharing in depth how the assignments work over the course of the semester.

Michelle: You’re welcome. My pleasure.

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

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

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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264. Collaborative Rubric Construction

Posted in classroom community, diversity, engagement, equity, gender bias, grading, higher education, inclusion, learning, motivation, online learning, rubrics, social justice, teaching
November 23, 2022

Students may not immediately trust faculty who they perceive as being different from themselves. In this episode, Dr. Fen Kennedy joins us to discuss how collaborative rubric construction can be used as a strategy for building and maintaining trust. Fen is an assistant professor of dance at the University of Alabama and the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Show Notes

John: Students may not immediately trust faculty who they perceive as being different from themselves. In this episode, we explore how collaborative rubric construction can be used as a strategy for building and maintaining trust.

[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 Dr. Fen Kennedy. Fen is an assistant professor of dance at the University of Alabama. They are also the author of a chapter in Picture a Professor, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus. Welcome, Fen.

Fen: Hi both of you, it’s good to be here.

Rebecca: Our teas today are:… Fen, are you drinking tea?

Fen: I am because I saw that there was a tea list, so I am drinking one of my favorite teas, which is a Lapsang Souchong. And because of the theme of my chapter, I have it in my wonderful mug that says, “What a beautiful day to respect other people’s pronouns.” Cheers.

Rebecca: Cheers. That sounds wonderful.

John: It does and you know, I’ve wanted to drink that tea on here, but I was never quite sure how to pronounce it. [LAUGHTER] I do drink it fairly often, it’s a really nice tea. I keep it separate from the others so the smoke flavor doesn’t infuse the other teas.

Rebecca: See, unlike you, I just embarrass myself by trying to say things I don’t know how to say [LAUGHTER].

Fen: I have a wonderful tea from Plum Tea Company, which is the Picard tea, which is a variant of Earl Grey, which is wonderful.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: And a nice nerdy thing to do too. Many of our guests would appreciate that aspect of it, and we would too. I’m drinking a wild blueberry black tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, That sounds nice, John.

John: It’s very good.

Rebecca: A little different than your normal. I just have Earl Grey today.

John: But not the Picard variant.

Rebecca: Yeah, unfortunately, I didn’t know that that was an option.

Fen: It’s wonderful, I think there’s kind of sweet orange notes in it. I’m a big fan.

Rebecca: That sounds really good. We might have to look, John.

John: So we invited you here, today, to discuss your chapter in Picture a Professor entitled “Collaborative Rubric Creation as a Queer Transgender Professor’s Tactic for Building Trust in The Classroom.” You begin the chapter by noting that transgender and non-binary faculty are rarities in higher education. Could you describe some of the challenges that you face as a non- binary transgender faculty member, who’s also a first-gen student and an immigrant?

Fen: Well, that’s a mouthful. [LAUGHTER] My chapter title is a mouthful and then the question is a mouthful, and well, I will do my best. And so well, I thought about this in advance. And I could give you some of the easiest figures and more objective measures of those obstacles. For example, I worked out quite recently, as an immigrant on an H1 visa, which is a work visa, but not a citizenship or residence visa, you are not allowed to work outside of the contract that you’re hired for. So any work that I’ve done outside of the university, I have had to donate my income to someone else, or just refuse payments. And I worked out that with the money I have lost being an immigrant, I could have put down a second deposit on a house.

Rebecca: …not insignificant.

Fen: No, so it’s not insignificant. The other thing that I think a lot of people don’t realize is that as an immigrant, you can’t really buy your books unless you absolutely know you’re staying in the country. So during my PhD, when you want to look up something, you can’t turn to your wonderful bookshelf and pull down the book that you own, it’s write to the library and see if it’s in stock and see when you can get it. So it’s this little logistical things. And I know we’ll get to gender because the chapter is about gender. But on the first-gen student, something that comes to my mind is: I was in a teacher training and the person giving this training said, “Well, you’re first-generation students, they’re really going to struggle in the classroom, you’re going to know who they are, they’re going to have a hard time knowing how to do things.” And I sat there getting my PhD, getting ready to teach and thinking, I’m not sure I like how I’m being described as someone who’s going to struggle who’s going to have these challenges, and no one has ever said, What advantages does a first-generation student have? What do they bring that other students lack? And so I think sometimes one of the big things is that you’re perceived as a challenge, you’re perceived as someone who’s going to struggle, which means that when you do something that’s original, or creative, or critical, often the response is to say, “Oh, that’s because you don’t understand” rather than, “Oh, this could be a productive direction that other people might want to take also.”

Rebecca: Those are some really good points. I think many of our students are labeled in all kinds of ways that prevent us from seeing all that they have to offer, and how much they can move our classrooms forward and how much we can learn from our students and not have this expectation that they’re going to fail. I really appreciate that you put that right out front.

Fen: I think also, when you follow that line of thinking, a lot of teachers… and I think the book is getting towards this point as a whole… a lot of teachers plan to teach to the students they want rather than planning to teach the students they have. So when they design syllabi, when they design policies, when they design their standards for the course, they picture an ideal student and say how would that student fit in? Rather than saying, “Okay, who is coming into my classroom? What do they need when they get out of it? And how do I take them on that journey in a way that makes them feel engaged, delighted, enthusiastic, valued.” And so we’re talking about Picture a Professor, but maybe not picturing our students is another thing that we could work on.

John: That could be a sequel, Picture a Student.

Fen: Absolutely.

John: I think when we all start teaching, we often have some assumptions about what our students are going to be like. But the reality of our students is often quite different. And that can lead to some challenges for both students and faculty. Following up on that a little bit, what do you do to try to find out more about who your students are.

Fen: So one of the things I tried to do is, think of the people that I hung out with, in my day-to-day life. I hung out with other immigrants, I hang out with first-gen students, I hang out with queer people. And I know about their barriers to coming into education. I hear a lot of people who’ve had really, really awful experiences. And I think about myself, and I was like, “What is the kind of classroom environment that I would have enjoyed? What is the kind of classroom environment that they would have felt happy in and at home in.” So I start with trying to make the door to the classroom as wide as possible, rather than keeping it narrow and forcing students to fit their way through. And then the other thing, I think, what I do is, I started university teaching when I was 23 and I was younger than some of the people in the room with me. And so I didn’t feel like I could step into a classroom and have authority from any degree that I had, or any age that I had, or any status that I had. And so really, if I wanted my students to do what I wanted them to do, I felt like the other end of the deal was I had to know more and teach it really well. And so coming from that perspective, I think, and not thinking of myself as entitled to teach and not thinking of myself as entitled to be at the front of the room, but having to work to be at the front of the room. And part of that work is making a space for the students who are in the room with me. And so I don’t have particular always things that I do. But I try and improve my classroom every semester and make it better for more people.

Rebecca: One of the things that I really appreciated about what you’ve said, Fen, is an underscoring of the term “delightful” multiple times, so that it’s not just something that a group of students can deal with, or it’s survivable, [LAUGHTER] which I think is maybe the bar that is often set, but actually, that you set the bar at delightful. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Fen: Well, it helps that I’ve always really liked being in classrooms. And school for a while was my safe space. Which means that I, in some ways, have in my past, lacked empathy with people who have not found that and who have not liked learning. And it took some hard experiences for me to realize, “Okay, this is something I’m going to have to step away from, because we’re taught often, if you don’t like learning, you’re lazy and it’s something of a personal failure, and you could be doing better.” And then realizing how many people are in a situation where they are taught that academia hates, and why would you want to constantly be in a space that hates you, for things that you have no control over? But when I start to teach things, I think, “How can I share this subject that I find really cool? How can I share it in a way that conveys my enthusiasm to the people I’m teaching it to.” And that’s fairly easy in a dance technique class, because dance is great fun, and also hard work. It is more difficult when you are teaching graduate critical theory. It’s more difficult when you’re teaching the required history course. But I love critical theory and I love history. And I find them really fun. And I think part of the way that you get people to enjoy the classroom is to give them ownership of the material and allow them to not step back at a distance and see the knowledge that is far off that they must aspire to, but put them in the middle of it and say this is work that we’re doing together. I say that I try and teach history, not to teach students history, but to teach the historians of the future, which means we’ve got to have debates and we’ve got to have conversations and we’ve got to have feelings and opinions that are legitimately ours rather than the ones we think we ought to have. [LAUGHTER]

John: That brings into the topic of your article, which is collaborative rubric creation with students. Could you talk a little bit about how you started doing that and how it’s been working?

Fen: Yes. So I really came to this idea of collaborative rubric creation because I was assigned a choreography course to teach for the first time and that gave me the opportunity to think philosophically about how does one grade choreography? [LAUGHTER] How do you grade someone making art? Because that is always… and I talked about this a little bit in the chapter… that’s always a big problem of a question in creative disciplines. There’s not a qualitative answer. There’s not a specific right or wrong. So how do you start to design that. And I must here, give a shout out to Jessica Zeller, who is a phenomenal dance teacher and also a really important voice in the conversation around what we call ungrading, and thinking about how to take down some of these structures of ranking students in boxes. And so looking through her ideas and trying to work out myself, and I thought, “Oh, what if we start the semester by talking about what art means to my students and what they want to do as choreographers,” because not every student wants to be a high-art experimental installation, interdisciplinary maker, even I kind of wish that more people were that thing. I don’t want to make them into me, I want to make them into the best version of them, which means I’ve got to understand what they want And also sometimes knowing that they don’t have exposure to all the things that they might want to be. So what’s the balance there? And I remember the first time I did it, I kind of structured it into their creative process, their self-directed learning and their citizenship. And what happened when we talked about the three different categories is they ran into all their assumptions about what they thought dance was. And so somebody had put down that an excellent choreographer uses partnering. They’ve done these wonderful, like written out on paper, and I said, “Well, do you think all expert choreographers use partnering? Do you think a piece is less if it doesn’t?” And they were, “Oh, wait, no, that doesn’t work.” And I said, “Okay, so what is the skill that’s being used? And we boil down, and so we got past these things that use partnering, like use motif and repetition, and started to realize what was underpinning those ideas, not the ingredients of what choreography had to include, but how you went about making choreography. And one of the big moments for the class was actually when we talked about citizenship, because they talked about “Oh, show up on time and answer all the questions.” And I said, “Well, with that in mind, how can you be a good citizen on a bad day? How can you be a good citizen when you are sick, or stressed out or having a panic attack?” And they went “Oh,” and so rather than, again, these indicators of good behavior and good practice, what is underpinning that or with a sense of being responsible for the space and yourselves and others, which sometimes is going to look different? It might be, “you have to email me and let me know if you’re not being there so I can shuffle the group’s around.” It might look like, “I’m going to take it notes for my friends and catch them up,” it might be “I’m going to zoom into class on a day that I can’t make it to class.” And that is a professional way of being a good citizen. And so it became a really generative conversation. And I went, “Okay, I’m going to do this every time I can.”

Rebecca: Sounds like a really productive conversation, and probably really pushing students to embody what it means to be a choreographer in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise approach the class.

Fen: I think it also gets them past the answers that they’ve just kind of learned by rote. And when I do this in technique classes, I start off by asking them, “What do you want to learn?” And usually, there’s a whole range from people who want to do their situps and their push ups at the start of class every day and get strong, there’s the people who would absolutely not like to do that. There’s the people who want to improvise, there’s the people who do not want to improvise. And when we only kind of pull it together, we see where the biggest priorities are and where, and what’s actually falling off the edges. And then I say, “Well, how do you want to be assessed on learning those things?” And so then, rather than their assessment criteria,being their straight knees and their wonderful athletic posture, we get things coming out, like “my problem solving,” “my adaptability,” “my ability to set a goal for myself and meet it within the range of my body.” And I really enjoy getting them to set goals that they’re invested in, so they understand that they have reasons behind them that they can then work towards, because they’re what they want to be working on anywhere.

Rebecca: One of the things you said a minute ago, in two different contexts was the students don’t always know where they want to be, or who they might want to be, or what kind of choreography they might want to make. How do you help students down that journey to discover and explore? Because that seems very tied to your rubric and your strategies here.

Fen: Yes, it is. And actually, it’s this process of creating trust. And I say that the rubric helps create trust, because they know that they’re not going to have a surprise. But if we’re all invested in the same goals, then we’re going on a path that we all kind of want to be on, which means that I get to say, “Look, I’m going to try something with you might seem really silly, and I want you to try it, I want you to try it for 15 minutes, and then we’ll talk about it, will you trust me enough to be really silly with me for 15 minutes?” And usually the answer is yes, because we’ve already agreed that we’re on the same page with what we want to get out of the experience. And I’m not going to suddenly swerve off into a different direction on my own agenda. So I think this idea of creating trust and buy-in allows me to expose students to a lot of different things, and a lot of different ideas, not because I’m saying this is right and this is where I want you to go even if you don’t understand why. But in the service of these goals that we’ve agreed upon, that we share, I think this will be helpful.

John: So it sounds like this process of rubric creation is not just creating this sense of trust, but you’re also breaking down some of their preconceptions about what the class is going to be about. Do you ever have trouble getting students to converge on a rubric? You mentioned that students come in with very different expectations, How do you resolve some of the differences in those expectations as a class?

Fen: Well, sometimes we just do all of them, if we have time to take different approaches, and we say, we’re going to compromise here, we’re going to do this some days, and not this other days, like I’ll do your situps, a nice, stretchy, soft, warm up, and we’ll see which one we like better. And at the midterm, we’ll check in and we’ll decide which one we like. And if we want to shift things. So, I think that’s how we’re resolving. And sometimes we sit down, we talk about it until we find out what we actually want and where the middle ground is. And on occasion, I say “There are limits what I can provide, and I cannot provide this experience for you. It is out of my skill set. Sorry, this is where you can go and get it.” And I think that two threads that I’m hearing myself say that I want to pull out the idea that things can change, that what you decided at the beginning can shift if it’s not working, and that I am willing to have limits in front of them and say, “This is what I can do and this is what I can’t.” And I think that’s really useful for them as well, because it helps them understand. If I’m there modeling that I get to set limits around my own workload, maybe they do too.

Rebecca: How often do you check in about the rubrics that you designed collectively,

Fen: Formally, not very often. And I think informally a lot, depending on the class. I think the first time I did it, I didn’t check in enough. And there was some confusion about how it would work out at the end of the semester. And it caused more stress than it needed to. And so the next time I followed the same pattern for a quarter of the class, I had regular check-ins throughout the semester, and I would look at like, “How is this working for you? And are you going in the directions that you want to and are you working your way towards these goals and targets,” rather than showing up at the end and going “Okay, now you’re going to be assessed on these things.” So I’ve learned to check in more. But depending on the class, sometimes I check in just as I chat to the students, and sometimes I have scheduled time,

John: How have students responded to the process, have they found it very helpful? Has it helped build that climate of trust?

Fen: Well, especially during the pandemic, thinking about what was reasonable to expect of students was really useful. And I think, because I already had this kind of system in place, I sent out things to my classes saying like, “What can I expect from you in terms of WiFi? Can you make it to classes? If you can’t make it to classes, would you prefer a podcast style or blog style? Or would you want me to just put up a lot of stuff and ask questions? This is the range of my flexibility, what would you like within it.” And so I think that was really, really useful. And I think it helps people who have obstacles to being in the classroom stay in the classroom. And I think that’s the big thing. Every semester, I have to submit my own benchmarks for what I want the students to do and how well they’ve done. But I am allowed to set my own benchmarks. And recently I shifted from what percentage of students are getting an A to, I would rather that a broader perspective of students were getting Bs across a wide range of material. When I submitted that benchmark, I said, “I don’t want to disregard the work of all the people who fought super, super hard to stay in the classroom and get a B in the course, because for some students, that is a huge amount of work. And they put in hours and hours and hours of time and effort and growth to get Cs and Bs in a course and I want the assessment of my teaching to show that I’m recognizing that and I’m trying to make it possible for them to do that. And I am proud of them when they do. A thing I hear a lot from my students is “You genuinely care about us. We know that you care about us,” and I’m really happy hearing that.

Rebecca: A thread that we’ve heard a lot lately is that the methods and things that are meant to be inclusive usually also involve methods that show care.

Fen: And I want to point out the other thing that I remember that a student said to me recently is, “You made me work harder in that class than I’ve ever worked in any class in my life. And I did it.” And so when we’re talking about these inclusive teaching methods and caring teaching, it’s not that we lack rigor, and it’s not that we asked for less. In fact, after we end up asking for more, because you can’t follow a known system, you can’t go to essaydownloads.com, which is not a real website… but I know things like it exist… because it’s not going to work for the kinds of work I’m asking my students to do. And so they’re being asked to meet really, really high standards, but they’re ones that will be genuinely professionally helpful to them as individuals.

Rebecca: You mentioned ungrading earlier and talked about students’ individual growth. Do you have students use the rubric to essentially self-evaluate or are you using the rubric to evaluate?

Fen: That depends on the class. In a choreography class I have the students come to me with a portfolio and a pitch for the grade they think they ought to get based on rubric, and we talk about whether that’s realistic or not. Actually, I’ve never had anybody over pitch, I’ve always had people under pitch on what they think they deserve, which is kind of sad, really. And then in some classes I use the rubrics more as a more conventional grading tool.

John: I think we’ve also heard that quite a bit from people who’ve used ungrading, that they’re more likely to find people who underestimate how much they’ve learned during the course, which is something that surprised me when I first heard it. But now we’re starting to hear that a lot. You mentioned teaching during a pandemic, and I would imagine that that’s especially challenging in a class like dance or choreography. Could you tell us how you manage your classes during a period of pandemic teaching?

Fen: I kind of had a great time. Like, obviously, there’s a lot that was not a great time. But I really admire the work my students did during those times. The commitment it takes to show up on Zoom and dance in your dorm room and keep being an artist is so much harder than it is to be when you’re in a studio among other artists. And they held themselves to that standard. I did talk with students about the reality of how do you give your best attention, which for some people is sitting looking at the computer and for some people is walking around, pottering, while they listen to a lecture and thinking about like, “Okay, what does it take for you to give your best attention today? because I’d rather you gave me your best attention than sat here, not being able to listen.” And I think that was useful. I was very lucky that I got to go completely remote for a semester. And I taught theory classes initially. And then I came back to a mix of theory and practical classes, one of which was choreography. And just like, as I said before, with the students it’s not planning for the class you want to have, it’s planning for the class you’ve got, and I had to do a hybrid class. And so rather than go “Okay, how do I make Zoom get as close as possible to an in-person class,” I said, “Okay, the first five weeks are going to be completely over Zoom, and at the end of it, we’re going to make a film about closeups. And we’re going to think of the dimensions of the Zoom screen and what it takes to be an artist within the tiny box. And so using the restrictions of the pandemic to shape how his class was going to be structured. And in history, again… I’m not sure if either of you have given lectures… but sitting on Zoom and watching a row of empty black boxes with a couple of faces while you try and give a lecture is a special kind of hell. [LAUGHTER] And I talked to my students, and they said, “We really do need lecture content.” I said, “Okay, so one class a week, I will just give you content over a lecture. And the other class of the week, you’re going into breakout rooms, and you’re going to do solo space self-directed learning. I’ll have questions for you.” I had a GTA, who was also in the rooms and they just talked their way through the history and the evidence and the questions and it was wonderful. And when I came back live, it completely reshaped my pedagogy. Because knowing that people were willing to get really deep into conversation further then I could take them to a kind of a guided discussion. And so not everybody wants to learn that way. Some people really do not want to sit and get into a really active lively discussion. And so finding a balance as I’m in the classroom, and there’s more opportunities. I call it “choose your own adventure,” but letting people have flexibility in how they’re learning. There’s lots of different ways to get through the course and that was shaped by Zoom and the necessities of how we teach dance during a pandemic.

Rebecca: So we talked at the top of the conversation about how few transgender and non-binary faculty members there are. And representation, as we know, is very important for our students and for our colleagues and to have a nice, wonderful learning environment. Could you talk about some of the challenges that you faced, as a faculty member who identifies as transgender and non-binary?

Fen: We are in a moment in America, and the world, where we don’t have a cultural consensus that transphobia is wrong, we don’t have a cultural consensus that homophobia is wrong, which means that putting myself out in the classroom is in itself a political statement. And that’s not one that every school wants to get behind. And it’s not one that every student feels necessarily confident about when they encounter me. We’ve got people coming in as undergrads, often I’m the first non-binary person they’ve met. And here I am grading them, and are they going to get into trouble if they get it wrong? And oh, my goodness, it’s a non-binary person at last. Let me ask them all my gender questions. Let me come out to you. There’s a spectrum of responses. But always, there’s a certain necessary caution around what I am allowed to say and who I am allowed to be. So that if somebody does say, “You’re grooming our children, you are putting our students in danger, you are sexualizing people and you are teaching children things that are against their religion.” And there are all things that could come up, how am I going to respond? And what is the record of my pedagogy and my actions going to say in response to those accusations? and that is a lot of weight to carry on your shoulders on a day-to-day basis. To know that the record of your actions might have to answer those questions. And so that’s something I think about a lot. And something I try and be very careful around. I have become more and more known for speaking about these interviews. I have been interviewed by Dance Teacher magazine, a couple of times, I keep my own blog about it. I’m someone that people go to when they want someone to talk about dance and gender now, which again means having a practice and how I shape my words and my presence. But on a practical level, I live in a small city, and even things like going out in the evening… is a student going to be in a restaurant? Or is a student going to be waiting on me and my partner? If someone takes a photo of me out in public with a glass of alcohol in my hand, is that going to come back to haunt me? And so it’s not just my professional life that gets shaped by these issues. But it’s every aspect of my life, where I have to be conscious of, again, what my actions may be held up as evidence for.

Rebecca: That’s a lot of emotional and cognitive energy that goes into all of that, and I imagine a great deal of planning, as you’re thinking about your courses.

Fen: Yes, there’s a lot of thinking, and I want to expose my students to a lot of very diverse material. And also, how do I give them the language of opting out? I don’t want to force anyone to watch things. And I’m actually a big believer in giving everybody the right of refusal in the classroom, most of the time, I work a lot with touch, which means you have to work really hard about consent. I definitely grew up in an era where your body was just picked up and moved around. And so thinking about my students’ right to say no to things, which often results in people feeling more comfortable saying yes to things. And I think in the same way that I sit down with my students and I say my pronouns are they and them, if you have a strong conviction that you can’t use that, you can use something else, I do prefer not to be called Mam, which I think is partly gender and partly British. But given that I’m out in the world, when I’m talking to my peers, and there’s not that level of force and power imbalance, I use they/them pronouns, and that’s what I expect people to use for me. But when it is someone over whom I have a certain amount of power, I think I have to give that little bit of space for them to go, “Okay, I need to think about my beliefs and my feelings and my desires and the power in the situation and know that I’m not going to mess up my entire academic career if I don’t get this right first time.”

Rebecca: Sounds like a lot of grace is extended. [LAUGHTER[

Fen: A lots of people weren’t sure about me coming down to Alabama. I chose to take the job here and I think it’s really important I say I had choices and I chose Alabama, in part because of how hungry the students were to learn, they really threw themselves enthusiastically at new challenging things. And I went, that’s where I want to be.

John: I was going to ask about that. While this could be challenging anywhere, I would think being in the south in general would make it much more challenging, especially given the level of religiosity of many of the students there.

Fen: Well, I think sometimes there’s a stereotype that the South is just an extra level of awfulness than anywhere else. And there’s a certain baseline of awful that you’re going to find absolutely anywhere where you’re a transgender professor. One of the places that I interviewed for a tenure-track position, they kind of grilled me for a long time trying not to say gender, but would I be willing to teach students with different beliefs? How would I manage students in the classroom who might have different ideas than me about how history worked? Which are valid questions, but really not the right question to ask when what you’re trying to say is, “How is your gender going to impact the classroom?” …which they can’t legally asked. And I walked into the interview at Alabama, and the head of dance said: “Just to check before we start the interview, you take they/them pronouns?” I’m like, “Yep.” And he went “Great.” And I was like, “Okay.” So in some ways, academia is a little blue bubble. But there are lots of things about being where I am in a situation that I am that I very much love and I also think that if people maintain this idea that the South is bad and awful, it’s often used as an excuse to stop people looking at their own behavior… we’re much better than the South, they need to change, they need to do things differently. People who are let’s get out of the south, let’s all move up north, whereas the activism down here is very powerful, like really incredible the work that people are doing to try and make the south a more livable place for everybody in it. And that should be respected and recognized, and it doesn’t do people justice to wrap the entire South up in this label of awful. That answer got a little tangled, but I think the summary of it is that there’s a lot of work to be done everywhere, and I’m happy to be doing the kind of work I want to do here.

Rebecca: That’s a very nice, succinct way of summarizing the tangle. [LAUGHTER] But it also always gets tangled, because there’s so many things that pull and push in different directions, and probably really worth acknowledging how much time you probably spend mentoring students who come to you based on your identity, and self-disclose because they’re looking for an advocate and they’re looking for a role model. And that labor is often incredibly invisible.

Fen: Yes. And I think, interestingly, I’m in a department where there’s a number of faculty members who collect… I call them goslings sometimes, [LAUGHTER] but students who, by virtue of identity or life situation, need extra love and support. And I think that every student at some point in their undergrad career needs a little extra love and support. And we are a large department. It’s hard to build those relationships with all the students, but I try not to just be there on the virtue of identity, like I do try and make time for anyone who asks for the time, often because I don’t get to know all the students very well, especially those with LGBTQ identities, you often can’t tell by looking. And so it helps me check my own judgment and make sure that I’m not unintentionally creating favoritism or groups. If somebody needs the help and the time, I want to be able to give it to them to the extent that I can. And I have had to learn how to say “I have X amount of time and then I have to have you leave my office.”

Rebecca: Boundaries, so helpful, so healthy.

Fen: Because if your professor is a person that your professor gets to be a person, just like you.

Rebecca: I feel like that’s such a powerful thing to end on. [LAUGHTER]

John: It is, yes. And humanizing the professor creates a much more positive environment where they do feel more connected to you.

Rebecca: Picture a professor, they are a person. [LAUGHTER]

Fen: Yes.

John: Okay. Well, we always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Fen: Well, I’m on sabbatical right now.

Rebecca: Woo hoo.

Fen: I have just gotten back from three weeks at the Hambidghe Arts Residency Center, which is just absolutely incredible… off the grid in the wilderness of the Georgia and North Carolina mountains. Fresh air. I got back yesterday.

Rebecca: Wow.

Fen: I leave on the 13th of October to go to Philly. I’m helping organize a partner dance event. And I am meandering up the East Coast, different cities ending in Ann Arbor where I am teaching a series of master classes and I’m presenting at a conference, and then I will come home and I’ll see what the next adventure is. But what’s next really is five cities in just under a month.

John: Sounds like a busy but productive schedule.

Fen: I’m really looking forward to it.

Rebecca: I hope you have wonderful travels.

Fen: 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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Transcript

143. Pedagogies of Care: Creativity

Posted in assessment, classroom community, covid-19, creativity, engagement, equity, grading, growth mindset, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogies of care, pedagogy, remote learning, rubrics, teaching
July 8, 2020

Is creativity something you value in the work that students produce? In this episode, Natasha Haugnes and Martin Springborg join us to discuss ways to spark, motivate, and support creativity.

Natasha has served in faculty and curriculum development at the Academy of Art University and as an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts. Martin is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Inver Hills Community College and Dakota County Technical College, Natasha and Martin both contributed to the Pedagogies of Care project and are two co-authors (with Hoag Holmgren) of Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts.

Show Notes

  • Haugnes, N., Holmgren, H., & Springborg, M. (2018). Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts. West Virginia University Press.
  • Pedagogies of Care
  • Haugnes, N., & Russell, J. L. (2016). Don’t Box Me In: Rubrics for Àrtists and Designers. To Improve the Academy, 35(2), 249-283.
  • Haugnes, N., & Russell, J. L. (2008, 2014) “What do Students Think of Rubrics? Summary of survey results: Student Perceptions of Rubric Effectiveness”
  • Sawyer, R. K. (2011). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation. Oxford university press.
  • Deci, E. L. (1972). Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic reinforcement, and inequity. Journal of personality and social psychology, 22(1), 113.
  • Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). Extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation in education: Reconsidered once again. Review of educational research, 71(1), 1-27.
  • Inoue, A. B. (2015). Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future. WAC Clearinghouse.
  • Nilson,. Linda (2019). Specifications Grading. Tea for Teaching podcast. August 21.
  • Tharp, Twyla (2006). The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life. Simon & Schuster
  • Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT)

Transcript

John: Is creativity something you value in the work that students produce? In this episode, we discuss ways to spark, motivate, and support creativity.

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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: Our guests today are Natasha Haugnes and Martin Springborg. Natasha has served in faculty and curriculum development at the Academy of Art University and as an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts. Martin is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Inver Hills Community College and Dakota County Technical College, Natasha and Martin both contributed to the Pedagogies of Care project and are two co-authors (with Hoag Holmgren) of Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts. Welcome Natasha and Martin.

Natasha: Good to see you. Yay.

Martin: Thanks for having us.

John: Our teas today are:

Martin: I’m drinking coffee this morning.

Rebecca: Always… Always the rebels.

Natasha: Well, I had my two cups of coffee and now I’m on to Wild Sweet Orange Tea…

Rebecca: That sounds good.

Natasha: … and it’s delicious. Yeah.

Rebecca: I have iced Scottish afternoon tea

Natasha: Afternoon? Huh…

John: And I am drinking Tea Forte Black Currant Tea. We’ve invited you here today to discuss Natasha’s contribution to the Pedagogies of Care project and your joint work on Meaningful Grading in the Arts. Natasha, could you start by telling us a little bit about your contribution to the project?

Natasha: Sure. “Nurturing the ‘aha moment’” is the topic of the video made. And it was based on one of the tips in the meaningful grading book that I co-authored with Martin and Hoag. This video focuses on the “aha moment,” or that moment of insight in the creative process, and how to really nurture students and invite them into that moment. I focused on the “aha moment,” which could also be called the moment of insight in the creative process because it really is associated with kind of joy and happiness and magic. And there are a lot of cultural myths around insight and creativity in general, but especially these magic moments. People think they come out of the blue, that they’re come down from God, that they’re somehow related to some innate ability. And research shows us, and people who are creative practitioners know, that this is not entirely true. So, I just decided to kind of hone in on that moment. In my work at the Academy of Art University, I have worked with a lot of students and a lot of instructors who are often drawn to creative fields because of the joy and they really want to engage in that, the joy of the creative process. But then when the students get to school, and when the new instructors come to teach, they often get really drained. And they find that there’s so much hard work and there’s so much stress in the classrooms, even in things like painting and graphic design and moviemaking classes, students seem to get really rundown, and they don’t connect with those moments of joy. So, this results in frustration. At my own school, we were seeing pretty high dropout rates of students at a certain point and I actually ended up working with at-risk students in my role as the Resource Center Director at the Academy of Art University many years ago, and that taught me a lot about working with students and engaging them in their creative process. A lot of the students I worked with, they were sent to me by an instructor who would say “This student is just not engaging. They’re really sloppy in their work. They’re really lazy. They’re not putting the time in.” And when I talk to those students, I would find patterns that really ultimately meant that they weren’t understanding their creative process. They were doing things like brainstorming a whole bunch of ideas, and then trying to finish one, but then getting distracted and thinking, “Ah, I’m going down the wrong path, I’m going to do this other project, I need to take this other approach…,” and they would go down another path, and then they would abandon that path, and they would take yet another approach and pretty soon it’s time to go to class and the project they’re presenting for critique looks like it was done at the last minute. Again, this is really frustrating for the student and the instructor. And I realized I needed to learn a lot more about the creative process in order to work with these students and help them connect to that joy, help them understand how the hard work connects with the joy, and help the teachers understand how the hard work connects with the joy. I think it’s really imperative that our faculty understand creative process and define it so we can teach it to our students. And this is especially important for students whose livelihood depends on creativity, like a game designer, a graphic designer, even an illustrator can’t just go to work and hope that insight comes, they need to learn how to have some control over that, not only for their own work, but just so that they continue to enjoy what they’re doing.

John: It sounds like part of the problem is that people think that creativity is just something that people either have or don’t have, and they don’t see that it involves a process that includes a lot of work. What types of things can we do to nurture students in making the connection between the work that they do and that aha moment to get them to that point, so that we don’t lose them on the way.

Martin: One thing that I talk about quite frequently with faculty, no matter their discipline, but especially in the creative fields, and one thing that we go back to quite a few times in Meaningful Grading, is rewarding failure and grading process versus grading that final product. If you value the development of a creative process and you value your students diving into the waters that they’re sort of murky, they cannot be afraid to do that. And at the same time, they should also be aware that you’re rewarding that effort and their engagement and what can be kind of a scary process for them, especially if they consider themselves non-artists or unable to do art because they don’t have some innate knowledge of it. So, as you develop grading systems, making sure to work into those grading systems those things that you truly value about that process and about your course.

Natasha: I think it’s really crucial. And something that I try to point out in the videos is breaking it down, scaffolding the process for them, breaking it down into small accomplishable steps and explaining to them: “No, this is not creativity, this is not your whole project. This is what you need to do now. And here’s what you need to do, and you need to put the work in to do it. And then you can move on to the next step.” I think that’s really important, and it’s just really important for the instructors to do that. We often have the overview, we understand the process, we have faith that they’re going to get there, but the students don’t, necessarily, and so that’s kind of what leads to those patterns of procrastination that we see with the students who aren’t doing so well. They put things off, they don’t understand the importance of that early hard work that you really have to just put in in order to get the payoff at the end.

Rebecca: What are some ways that you recommend building in experimentation or risk taking into the grading system? Because those are often things that we value in creative fields, but are harder things or things that we don’t always build into our evaluation systems. We might focus more on the principles of design or something technical, [LAUGHTER] because those are easy to measure.

Natasha: You’re a graphic designer, aren’t you, Rebecca?

Rebecca: I am. [LAUGHTER]

Natasha: I think graphic design is actually a really great example of a place where you can get really bogged down with rules, right? I mean, you can approach graphic design almost as a mathematician and just kind of go “ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink, ka-chink” and you can create stuff that follows the rules, but doesn’t really have a lot of creativity to it. And I guess one piece of advice, this goes to a recommendation that I’ve included in the video, but really simplifying criteria. Again, if you can break down the steps and have each step just be assessed on one or two criteria, that allows students to kind of say, “Okay, I’ve met the goal, now I can do what I want. I’ve done what that teacher needs to see, [LAUGHTER] and I’m going to pass, and now I can really play with it.” In some research that I did with a colleague of the Academy of Art University quite a while ago, we did this big study, twice actually, called “Student Perceptions of Rubric Effectiveness.” We found a common pattern in students’ responses, the students that really liked the rubrics said that they liked the rubrics because it told them exactly what they did have to do. And then once they checked off all those boxes, they could just run with it, and that was very freeing to them. We can talk later that a rubric is not always perceived that way, for some students, it kind of acts like a creative constraint. But, I think if we can keep the criteria to a minimum, that can allow students to know what they have to do and then have fun with it.

John: One of the things I noticed in reading through your book, and also in what you were just talking about in terms of giving stories scaffolding, is so much of the advice that you give could apply in pretty much any discipline. While your focus is on the arts, students don’t have the same expertise that we do. And the tasks that they’re facing are much more challenging and require much more processing. And they don’t always come in with that growth mindset. Much of what you’re talking about basically, is how to help students move from this binary view that they’re either good at it or they’re not to recognizing that learning is work, and that they can get better as they develop. And it was nice to see how closely this was aligned to the advice we try to give in so many disciplines.

Natasha: I totally agree, John, and actually I was in a conference at the University of Missouri where they actually viewed this video, and the person who was facilitating the workshop that I was lucky enough to be able to attend from the comfort of my own home office here, she’s a scientist, and she actually put up a map of the scientific method and said, this is the creative process and this is not the exclusive domain of artists and designers by any stretch of the imagination. So, I love having those cross-disciplinary conversations. I actually teach writing and ESL, and so I see some crossover there. I guess I’m just reluctant to offer a lot more advice to teachers of physics and math and economics and things like that, simply because I don’t have as much experience with those instructors. I’ve been exclusively art and design skills for a really long time. Martin, maybe you can speak to that. You have a lot more majors at your colleges.

Martin: Especially in those foundational courses, you’d certainly get students coming in at a variety of levels. So, they have past experiences, or they don’t, and those with past experiences sometimes come in with quite a bit of knowledge or experience in the arts. So, they’ve had a lot of high school experience, for example, that puts them at a different level than the other students in your class that are truly beginners and don’t have any prior experience and consider themselves very much non artists. So, one thing that’s important to do, just getting to the practical here, if you’re in an arts course teaching at that foundational level… or really going back to your comments about this crosses disciplines, no matter what discipline you’re in, if you’re teaching that foundational level course, getting everybody at that same base level at the beginning. Purely speaking from past experience here on this one point, I taught photography for about 20 years. And in my intro courses, I would frequently have students come in that had high school experience, and they had learned something and could demonstrate that thing. But, at the same time, they learned it in a, I’m not going to say the wrong way, but in a bad way. They picked up some poor practices from their previous education in that, and so you have to make an effort to untrain that a little bit and get them to that same process that you want everybody to engage in, at that very beginning level. So, that step and that effort also makes those students who are truly coming in as beginners and don’t have any previous experience realize that “Oh, yeah, this is something that I actually have to learn and that everybody has to learn and these students who come in with previous knowledge, it’s not just some inherent skill or ability that they have in the arts. Another thing that I found really helpful, in sort of leveling the playing field and making it apparent to those truly beginning students, is using my past beginning students who have come into my courses with no experience, using their products as exemplars when I’m talking about how I want somebody to do something. So, if I’m talking about an assignment, I’m using examples from, and I’m pointing out the fact that these students came in from like, say, they’re nursing students or their automotive students, or this student came in with zero knowledge, and this is the thing that they produced, and it’s actually an ideal example of what I want you to produce in this assignment. So, using that, and going back to those examples shows those students who come in as true non-native or true beginners, that that level of achievement is possible.

John: I think that was an interesting point, too, that also shows up in other fields. I know people teaching computer science often will note that it’s much easier to teach people who are true beginners than those who had been self taught or perhaps picked up something in a course, where perhaps not an optimal pathway was given to them. The importance of unlearning things, perhaps, or breaking down the structures that people have and replacing them with stronger structures, can be as much of a barrier as people who are struggling just to get to that initial level. And that I imagine is particularly true in the arts.

Martin: Yeah. And going back to what I mentioned earlier about valuing process, maybe they do produce a product, that’s roughly the same result, like if they come up with the same result, but the process that they engaged in to get to there is so much more complicated and convoluted than what you’re trying to get everybody to engage in. So, they do need to go back and learn process. They do need to be at that same level as everybody else in your course.

John: One of the issues that often comes up in discussing creative fields is the importance of intrinsic motivation. Could you elaborate a bit on how we can help develop intrinsic motivation for students in these fields?

Martin: So, another thing that we talk about or that we bring up in Meaningful Grading frequently is the building of a community in an arts classroom and how important that is. That community is the intrinsic motivator. For example, if you make that a primary goal of yours in a course, you would then grade heavy on participating in that community at the beginning, knowing full well that the goal you have is to make that a more intrinsic reward for students and to back off on the grading or drop it all together, that participation component. So, that they not only learned that after they leave your course and after they leave an arts program that an arts community is vital. Like you can’t develop work in some sort of vacuum. As an artist, you have to be engaging with others, but also within your course, it’s just showing them and it’s creating that intrinsic value. Like, what’s bringing me back to this class day after day is not the grades that I’m getting from my instructor, but the vast resource that I have in these 30 other classmates that are able to give me feedback and support. And that also show me what they’re working on… that give and take. So, that’s one example of building in that intrinsic value.

Natasha: Correct me if I’m wrong, Martin, but a huge part of that community is critique. It’s critique discussions, right?

Martin: Exactly, hours and hours of it.

NATASHSS: …and helping students to understand that just getting that conversation, it doesn’t even have to be feedback, but a conversation, and engaging people to talk about your work does build intrinsic motivation. That’s the big payoff that we’re working towards.

Martin: And if you don’t have that tight community in that class, when you get to the middle or the end of that class, when you really want students to be engaging honestly in critique, it’s going to be like pulling teeth. You have to foster that community so that students feel comfortable, that they can open up, they can give opinions about other’s work, and accept opinions about their own work.

Natasha: I kind of want to get into a little bit of that intrinsic/ extrinsic motivation research. And I guess one of the things that got me into this field, and my obsession with grading and creativity, which people kind of look at me and they say “You talk about grading in art school, shame on you.” But the thing that was so confusing for so many of these at-risk students that I worked with before was they were engaging in those conversations, or they thought they were, with their instructor and their instructor would say things like, “Yeah, you know, you’re doing great, keep going.” And that can mean “Keep going. You got to keep working. ] 3 handclaps] But you’re not there yet.” But the student was hearing it as “Yeah, I’ve done it. Good enough.” Right? And so that student would say, “I got a D+, I don’t understand. Like, what’s going on? The teacher likes me…” or “the teacher said I was doing great.” And so they weren’t able to suss out the actual evaluation in those conversations, especially these new students. So, this is where it is so important to actually have grading systems that align with those conversations and that reflect those conversations. Keith Sawyer, he is like the creativity guru who I follow. He’s amazing. He wrote this book called Explaining Creativity. And there are a couple of pages in this book, Explaining Creativity, where he does essentially a synopsis of all the research on the effects of reward and grading on creativity. And there’s some things that we can look at here that are kind of important… that yes, we can extinguish intrinsic motivation with grades, we can do it by giving As for everyone. We can do it by just throwing grades that are completely unconnected to the actual conversations we’re having in class. And we can do it when we grade students and use a whole lot of really judgmental language and convey that judgment. That will all really decrease intrinsic motivation and creativity. But a lot of that early research on intrinsic-extrinsic motivation goes back to the Edward Deci studies, I believe, and he actually did more work on this later. And there’s a more nuanced conclusion that he came to later that when grades and rewards are perceived as information, when these grades and rewards are based on the quality of work that students are turning in, that can actually enhance creativity, and it can really build intrinsic motivation. But even when you’re using grades well, they shouldn’t be emphasized too much. This is the conversation that I often had in faculty development when I was working with new teachers. Oh, come to class, you’ll get five points. Five Points, that’s not why you come to class. You should not be coming to class to get the five points; you should be coming to class because the conversations are important. That’s why we want you here… and just changing the script in how we talk about grades. You need to have a grading system that has a lot of integrity. But, we should not be banging that over our students’ heads all the time, it should be kind of in the background just running along in the background. And what we communicate to students is the intrinsic rewards of all the work that we’re having them do.

Martin: And that’s why your grading system has to transform a little bit over the course of a semester, going back to that grading heavily on participation at the beginning of the course, where you have to get the students to the course to participate in the beginning for them to realize that there’s value in those conversations. If nobody shows up, they aren’t going to have conversations, but then that can change and it can evolve over the 16 weeks or 10 weeks or whatever length your course is.

Natasha: Yeah, and there are those students who really do care about grades I find in art and design school, there’s a certain subset of students who really don’t care, and that’s fine. And so they’re kind of on their own path, and they’re often doing well. But there are those students who really care and there are the students who are on the verge of failing out of school so they have to care. And I find that just understanding that, instructors need to leverage that knowledge to convince students to do stuff that we want them to do… that we know will do them good anyway, right? So if I say, “Okay, you’re going to be really a grade grubber… you want an A do these things,” and they’re the things that they need to do anyway. It’s a way of kind of tricking them into doing what we want. If you’re grading what’s important in your course, it’s going to work out, it’s going to work out for the students who really care about the grades, for the ones who don’t as much, hopefully, they’ll just be intrinsically motivated to understand why they need to engage. But grading what’s important is really crucial in that, I think.

Rebecca: One of the things we’ve talked a bit about is scaffolding and helping provide structures. So if we were to provide structure for faculty who are thinking about the idea of building a grading system that has the values that we’re talking about, things that really they care about or are important to their class, what are some of the steps you would recommend they go through to actually develop that system so it actually does reflect the values that they want?

Natasha: Well, [LAUGHTER] my answer to that is it’s ultimately working towards a rubric. And again, that can be kind of a bad word. I’m the one who’s been walking around the art and design school for 25 years saying, “Let’s build rubrics. And let’s do normings.” And I had a photography teacher tell me one time “Natasha, you gotta understand when you say “norming” to an artist, I mean, that’s like death, you know?” So I’m like, “Ah, sorry.”

Martin: There’s a reason why we don’t have assessment in the title of our book.

Natasha: Yes.

Martin: That was on purpose.

Natasha: It was by design. Absolutely. For the really grade-averse instructors, I start with a conversation. And I usually start with grading because that’s a really good entryway. And I’ll just say, “What are you teaching? And what does that look like? And what does it look like when a student does it? And what does it look like when a student doesn’t do it?” And really, that’s where you start. And then I think the next step is really getting real student work in front of this instructor or this department or this cohort of instructors who are teaching the same course… different sections of the same course. They need to look at the student work and they need to say, “Well, yeah, that one meets the criteria for this course that doesn’t.” Why? Why not? Having those conversations, that’s like the best investment that I think any department or any instructor can make into really focusing their teaching and to improving assessment is just think about how you’re making what you teach visible. And then what does it look like when it’s acceptable and when it’s not acceptable, when it meets the goals and when it doesn’t meet the goals? And then it just moves on from there. And if what you think is important, the quality of the color print in your poster, or the resolution on your screen of your logo, or whatever the heck you’re talking about, it might be process. So again, what does that look like? Well, I want to know that they’re listening to the feedback and really taking it in. Well, how can we make that visible? Maybe I have them do a little recording or do a short paper saying here’s all the feedback I heard, and here’s how I responded. “Joey told me I should change the concept, but I didn’t like that idea because…, so I’m not going with that…” and actually have them make that thought process visible. So, it takes some, again, creativity on the part of the instructor in the field of the teaching and learning. But usually, if there’s something really important that you’re teaching, you can have a way to make it visible and figure out what you’re looking for. And what does it look like when there’s evidence that the student has done what you need them to do? And what does it look like when that evidence is not there yet?

John: I usually meet with new faculty and generally ask them what would they like to see workshops on and, about six or seven years ago, one thing that was requested was a workshop on evaluating creative work. So I reached out and we got four people from different departments. We had someone from art, someone from music, someone from theatre, and someone from English. And they put together a presentation of how they evaluate creative work. And one thing that was in common was they all used rubrics, and they all talked about how there are certain fundamental skills or processes that students have to follow. And that’s what they embed in the rubrics and it surprised a lot of people in STEM fields who were attending because they were much less clear about what they were expecting from students and They expected something that would be much less well defined. And so one of the things they also emphasized, and you’ve talked about is that it’s telling students exactly what they’re expected to do and what types of things they need to demonstrate in the work before they can embellish on that. And that was a really important feature in all of their discussions, the same arguments show up in your book. That surprised many people outside of the creative fields.

Natasha: Oh, those are my tribe. That warms my heart to hear that, John. That’s exciting, yeah.

Martin: One of the added benefits of using rubrics is that time saved as well. Faculty time is a precious commodity. And if you can convince them or just show them how much time will be saved by simply having that rubric available, and using it as a guide, as you’re going through the assignments that are piled on their desk, it’s a convincing argument.

Rebecca: So, we talked a lot about building in values into our evaluation system. Can you talk about some of the things we should avoid doing.

Martin: I can speak to that a little bit. So, one thing that I’ve seen a lot of arts faculty members do… from a student perspective. So, coming up through the arts, one thing I’ve seen a lot of, and heard stories about, is the instructors bringing their personal bias, their own career and background, and that subjectivity in general, to the process of evaluating student work. So I’ve heard some pretty bad horror stories about that. For example, I’ll just go into one story quickly because I think just every faculty member who’s hearing this should know that this is never something that you want to repeat. So all the work, as you can imagine, all the prints, lining the board during critique and the instructor just, without words, just going across the board, pulling work down and throwing it out the window. Like if he doesn’t like it, right… if it doesn’t meet his criteria, which are a mystery, by the way…

NATASHAS: I’ve been in those classrooms. I’ve seen that.

Martin: Tell non-arts people about these stories, and they’re like, “no.” Yeah, it really happened. So remembering that you got to check your personal bias and your personal preference for art at the door and rely a lot on, or more on, having students engage in self evaluation, like did they feel like, and how do they feel like, they have made this, or communicated this, through their work, this issue that they think is important through their work. And if it doesn’t, like if you’re not understanding, then engage in a conversation about it. Like how they feel they’re getting there and where you think they’re not getting there. So using that as a starting point instead of your own, “I am the authority on art, and this is why this does not work.” That’s a huge demotivator.

Rebecca: I think one of those biases that a lot of faculty might bring to the door, is the history of white art created by white individuals.

Martin: This is the history of art, it’s all white male.

Rebecca: If students are creating their work from different cultural perspectives, and the faculty member is not up to speed on other cultural perspectives, we’re enforcing essentially a white supremacist point of view and system. So how do we engage in those moments in a way that’s productive, especially if we don’t understand the cultural background that something is based on?

Martin: Yeah, if students can’t place themselves in the history that you’re talking about, you’re referring to, how are they to imagine themselves in that world in the future?

Natasha: I’m gonna offer just one little tip here because yes, I hear you, Rebecca, and we see it everywhere in the overwhelming influence and sort of self-perpetuation of the white colonialist culture, even in our art classes. Something that we found when we did our rubrics research was that students, in general, really love rubrics, it helps guide their work. But what they really loved… even more than the grid of language… was samples, examples of work, examples of work that span the quality. Here’s an example of something where somebody tried really hard but they didn’t quite hit the mark. Here’s some examples of passing work. Here’s some examples of work that really hits it out of the park. And it’s really important not to have one example, especially in a creative field, because what happens then? The students who are not very competent will copy. Here’s an opportunity to allow for many different interpretations and really show those to your students. Consider using student work from previous semesters from a diverse range of students with diverse content. And that gives students something to connect to, it helps them see themselves in the class, it helps them understand that you, as an instructor, see them and value them. And that even though you have these criteria, there are many ways to reach those goals and reach those marks, those criteria that you’re putting out.

John: And so, by including a range of examples too, from different genres or different approaches, so that it does not become just a Western culture, perhaps. In recent podcasts we’ve done with Kevin Gannon, for example, he talked about decolonizing your syllabus and just suggesting that when you’re putting together your syllabus or searching for examples or exemplars, you could just do a little Google search on decolonize your [insert subject matter here] syllabus, and you can often find some good discussions of that with some good resources that you can build in.

Natasha: Yeah.

Martin: Yeah.

Natasha: This is incredibly important. In my work at California College of the Arts, there’s a very active group of instructors. They’re working on decolonizing the classroom, anti-racism, anti-racist pedagogies, and I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been in teaching there. I haven’t been there for a very long time. But I guess there’s a book called Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future by Asao Inoue. And he speaks quite a lot about assessment. And the point he makes about assessment is he says, in order to really decolonize your classroom, we need to be careful how we talk about quality, because quality so often is really culturally loaded. It’s so loaded that it is really hard for us to even untangle what we see and what we look for. And as a response to that, he really emphasizes grading on labor, grading on the work. And this, again, relates to some of the topics that are in this little video I put together although I don’t really call it this by telling students and taking all that quality judgment away from your rubric and from your assessment and just saying, create 50 of these things, [make 50 taglines, make 50 photographs, write five different thesis statements for your paper or write five different opening lines for your paper and just do that. And that’s the way of just asking for labor. You’re just saying do this work and it doesn’t have to look a certain way or be a certain way. But if you just put some effort into this, you will do well. This is a way of assessing work that actually pans out much better for students of color, students from cultures that are not traditionally represented very well in the faculty at colleges and university. So this is something I’ve been really taking to heart a lot. And in my writing class, I’ve actually, at CCA, where I teach freshmen composition to non-native English speakers, everything is graded on pass not passing yet. And so that really emphasizes the labor. If they’re not passing yet, the implication in that not passing yet grade is that you will do it again. Just do it again. Do it again. Nope, still not quite right, do it again. There have been a few students who have redone their essays four or five times, and it’s painful. But wow, they learn… they learn. And again, the trick is in not having five pages of criteria, but having a pretty narrow band of criteria that we’re looking for here that doesn’t get really niggly about the quality.

John: It sounds like it’s a specification grading system that you’re using. And it’s also building in something much more explicit than the “keep going” message that can be misinterpreted. So giving students the opportunity to try something to not quite get there, but to encourage them to continue working on it more explicitly than perhaps students always hear.

Natasha: And I’m glad you mentioned specifications grading, Linda Nilson has been a huge influence on the way I think about teaching and grading. She’s got a lot of really good thoughts out there for sure.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s really easy to evaluate is something that’s technical that has a right or wrong answer. How do we evaluate in a rubric format, things that are more qualitative, like the amount of experimentation or risk taking or other things that we might value in terms of creativity? Can you give us a concrete example?

Natasha: Actually, we have a a whole tip in our book about risk taking. There’s some really interesting ideas about ways you can really force students into making some mistakes and talking about them. There’s so much that comes up that seems, at first, like it’s going to be really hard to describe it in a rubric. But again, if we just get instructors and people who teach these disciplines together, talking about things, usually they can come up with something much more concrete, even if it’s not a cut and dry technical skill. Concept is one and I have some examples of like before and after for rubric wording. And often when we first write out a rubric, we might use some really sloppy language like “The concept is sloppy. It’s lazy. It just doesn’t work.” That just doesn’t work, right? [LAUGHTER] And so that might be the first draft. But then you start looking at some student work and talk with your colleagues. And you’ll find some more precise language will come out. Often when we talk about concept… I’m talking about the context of maybe an advertising campaign. But the concept is predictable. That’s a concept that is not acceptable is predictable. It’s the first thing that comes to mind when people think of this product. So, that is not a good concept. So there you go. Now we’ve made something a lot more understandable to the students and to the instructors when they’re using this rubric to grade later. And it can help you move forward in a way that that judgmental language won’t. It just makes the students feel bad. It makes the teachers frustrated, because we’re like, “Oh, it just doesn’t work.” But actually taking the time to look again at a range of work that doesn’t meet or that does meet the expectations for this thing that seems really nebulous at first usually you can manage to articulate it, and if you can’t, then maybe that’s not something you’re actually teaching in your class and maybe that’s outside of what you’re assessing. This is another tip that we come up with quite often. I think oftentimes instructors who fear grading, they think that they need to grade the art and you can’t grade art. No, you can’t grade art. You can’t say Picasso was better than Twyla Tharp. You can’t compare people and grade artists in a holistic way. Your grades should be based on what you’re teaching, and the objectives for your class. And we can communicate to our students, this is what we’re looking at here. You’ve also done this other stuff really well, but in our class, we’re really looking at this, so this is what your grade is based on. And that’s a really important factor in this whole endeavor, as well. One other little trap, I think, that faculty members can fall into when we talk about assessing grading or assessing creative work is that when we sit down to write our criteria out often the first thing we want to talk about is that incredible piece that that student two years ago did, it was amazing. It was mind blowing, it was so good and students need to see this and you get into those conversations. And that’s fun to talk about with your colleagues and you pull up that student’s work. And you talk about how great they were and what they’re doing now. Yes, that work should be shared with other students, that’s exciting. We have to celebrate those moments. But for the student in the middle of the pack in your class who’s kind of struggling, we need to think about what’s acceptable. That’s why it’s really important to really focus on that line between what meets expectations and what doesn’t meet expectations, because there are some students that just really need to work on that. [LAUGHTER] There are others that are going to blast through that and do really great things, but the ones that need our help are usually the ones that are hovering around that middle area.

Rebecca: So, we’ve talked a lot about rubrics and grading and evaluation, kind of assuming that we’re living in a perfect little world in some ways. But as we all know, right now, in this moment in time, there’s a lot of extra stress of COVID-19, protests related to Black Lives Matter, and any numerous other health things that are coming up because of COVID-19, remote learning. [LAUGHTER] All of these things, there’s lots going on. And so students are under more stress than normal. Students are often under a lot of stress, but this is like extra stress. So in these moments, what are ways that we can help promote creativity and also help our students really feel supported and being able to learn whether they’re on this point in the spectrum or they’re finding being creative really therapeutic and helpful, and all the way to students who just feel like they’re frozen because there’s so many things going on in the world, they feel like they can’t move forward.

Martin: I think now is a great time to be engaging students in creative process. It’s what gets us unfrozen. I’m speaking purely from my location at a Community and Technical College. If we can get students to engage in those often elective courses outside of their major or area of focus that allow them the opportunity to dive into those things that they are feeling a lot of stress about or anxiety about. It helps students be more successful in those courses that they do have to get through as a matter of course for their program of study.

Natasha: Oh, boy, these are hard times. I think, just most immediately from the video, the nurturing the aha moment, I think that it’s even more important than ever to break down our projects into small steps and help make those steps really kind of distinct from each other. I think that’s something that’s happening for students now, and for us, is we’re sitting and we’re staring at the screen all day long and it can become this big blob of existence where one thing bleeds into the other. And if we can really make the steps a little bit distinct, including a few steps where the students just disengage from all social media and anything online where they can actually be alone, without all of the electronic stimulation. I think those are things that can really help nurture their creativity. And also just I think there’s this funny paradox right now that we’re all alone. We’re all isolated. And yet, if you’re sitting there on your TikTok and Instagram and all day long you’re connected and that can be really, really stressful… and so convincing students to take a break from that, telling them we’re going through another step now. [LAUGHTER] And keeping things again really simple so that they can have that opportunity to use what we’re doing in our classes as a springboard to express themselves. Encourage them to incorporate what’s going on in their own life into the work that we’re doing, including examples and acknowledgments of what’s going on in the world. Really important. And it’s a fine line. I’ve just talked about this with my co teacher about how we’re going to be discussing Black Lives Matter, the latest George Floyd protests, and the Black Lives Matter protests, and the defund the police protests with our students who are mostly from Mainland China. Where do we even begin with that discussion? How do we do that without completely stressing them out, but also using it as an opportunity to feed their curiosity and acknowledge their own stress around these issues? So we need to let them know that we’re a safe space for everybody to engage and really help them break down things into small packages and celebrate their achievements. And again, let them keep working if they’re not quite there yet. Let them do it again. Let them do it again, let them do it again, I found myself being very forgiving on deadlines,

Martin: We also have to help faculty realize that they’re safe to engage in those redesigns and those conversations, and that comes from at that administrative level, engaging this at a college or institutional level. So that you aren’t leaving faculty to figure this out on their own. At my two colleges, for example, we have this new initiative that will run all the way through next year, and actually, for the next three years, probably called Equity by Design. And so we’re starting with a team comprised of administrators, directors, faculty, helping each other understand what this effort is going to be at a college level.

Rebecca: One of the things that you’ve both emphasize is kind of these small steps. And I think a small step for an expert might be different than a small step for a beginner. [LAUGHTER] Can we just take a minute or two to describe the differences between what an expert might think of as a small step and what might be in practice an actual a small step for a student.

Martin: One thing that we have been engaging in at my colleges is the TILT framework of Transparency in Learning and Teaching by Mary-Ann Winkelmes and her team. Mary-Ann came to one of our colleges in January and actually spoke and I’ve been facilitating communities of practice at both colleges on this topic this year. And in that work, there’s a realization as faculty review each other’s assignments and each other’s syllabi that you’re not starting at square one, you’re actually starting at square five, because we have to so often take a step outside of our disciplines to realize that, like you just said… So, what’s complex or complicated to one student is not for another and vice versa. So that transparency effort helps us to really outline the steps of an assignment, even those small steps. And so I’d encourage any family member struggling with whether or not to start at this point or that to review that transparency literature a little bit to engage with their colleagues, share assignments, and ask their colleagues whether or not they’re starting in the right place.

Natasha: That’s such a good question, Rebecca. The expert/novice thing is just something we grapple with all the time as instructors, especially if we’re teaching a new course… something that I’ve had to do in my own class… I was just thrown into a very new course for me a couple of years ago. And we did a new project on public service announcements this last semester, and I start something in class, I told the students “Now, choose a topic from this list of public service announcements that you’re going to create. And first thing you have to do is do some research. So let’s look at some websites.” And by having them do that in class and seeing what they come up with, I start to say, “Oh, right. [LAUGHTER]] They’re going to TikTok, you know, they’re going to these kind of places I didn’t even anticipate, and that allows me to then say, “Okay, I need to actually really scaffold this down.” I don’t want this to take two weeks of my time, I want them to find a credible source and then I ended up giving them a list of basically five places they should look. And you might say that is oversimplifying it, but again, this was just a step in the process of a larger PSA that they needed to make. So I needed to really like clamp that down. But I think if we can have students start in class and actually watch what they do, that gives us a lot of information about how big a step they’re willing to take on. And again, the little creative process chart that I put in the video that I created, I think a lot of creative practitioners, people who are really established, they’ve internalized this process, and they even don’t even want to put it on the line. They’re just like, “Oh, you bounce around, you know, you go back and forth and it’s not a linear thing.” And that’s not actually helpful to a new student who’s really nervous, who’s really stressed, who’s in school for the first time. They’re paying a ton of money to go to art school and their grandparents are really pissed because they should be an accountant. That’s intense. And so these students really need things broken down. And I think that just an awareness of our own expertise is a good starting point, and taking our cues from the students.

Rebecca: This has been really interesting. We always wrap up by asking what’s next? \

Natasha: What’s next, Martin? [LAUGHTER]

Martin: What’s next for me is to finish this book I’m working on with Cassandra Horii. We’ve been doing this project together for the past decade or so. I’ve been making photographs at colleges and universities across the country. We use those photographs that I make in classrooms in faculty teaching to help faculty think about their teaching practice. So we do this form of photo0based teaching consultation. So we’re putting those thousands of thousands of photographs together into a book. And we’re working with the same press that Natasha and I were with, West Virginia University Press, on that book. As far as my other life as an administrator in higher education, what’s next is figuring out what fall semester looks like. How are we engaging students? And in what space are we engaging them? Are courses going to be offered HyFlex, we don’t know? Are any courses going to be conducted face to face? Some of them have to be. You can’t teach arc welding at a distance. There’s some of that that has to be hands on. So figuring out exactly how we’re engaging students in this next phase is what’s next for me.

Natasha: I’m going really micro because these are really big questions. I’m going to keep working on the curriculum for my ESL class. I am now not in faculty development officially anymore at my university in an official role. My current role is that I coordinate and write the curriculum for one level of the English for non-native speakers at the Academy of Art University. And it’s exciting. So I’m working on actually integrating more of the anti-racist ecologies. I’m working on incorporating even more creative process readings and practices into my ESL course in the new zoom world, also really trying to figure out how to get students conversation practice in zoom. That’s the really tough one. So, I’m very much just kind of looking [LAUGHTER] about two feet in front of myself right now. And boy, as far as the bigger issues go, I don’t know. Let’s check in again in the fall. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think that’s fair.

Natasha: This afternoon, I’m going to make a creative genealogy for myself. I’m making a creative family tree, because I’m having my students do this next week when we start class and I’m going to do it for myself as a sample for them and also just to see what it’s like to go through that process. So that’s actually been really fun. That’s my fun thing that I’m doing.

Rebecca: It’s all about balance.

Natasha: Yeah.

John: Well, thank you. This has been fascinating. I really enjoyed reading through your book, and I’ve enjoyed your contribution to the Pedagogies of Care, and it’s been really great talking to you. Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah. Thank you so much.

Natasha: John and Rebecca, it’s been a really fun conversation. Thanks so much for inviting 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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