STEM education – tea for teaching

256. Sharing Our Stories

Posted in active learning, authentic learning, diversity, equity, gender bias, grading, higher education, learning, pedagogy, STEM education, teaching
September 28, 2022

Students do not always recognize the expertise of faculty who do not match their cultural stereotype of what a professor looks like. In this episode, Sarah Mayes-Tang joins us to discuss how she has used personal narratives to address these student biases. Sarah is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at the St. George Campus of the University of Toronto. She is also the author of a chapter in the Picture a Professor project, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

Show Notes
Transcript

Show Notes

Neuhaus, Jessamyn (forthcoming, 2022). Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. West Virginia University Press.
Peterson, D. A., Biederman, L. A., Andersen, D., Ditonto, T. M., & Roe, K. (2019). Mitigating gender bias in student evaluations of teaching. PloS one, 14(5), e0216241. (A study that suggests that reminding students of bias in course evaluations may reduce bias.)
Perusall
Ogawa, Y. (2009). The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel. Picador.
Borges, J. L. (1998). The library of Babel. Collect

Transcript

John: Students do not always recognize the expertise of faculty who do not match their cultural stereotype of what a professor looks like. In this episode, we examine one professor’s strategies to address these student biases.

[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 Sarah Mayes-Tang. Sarah is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at the St. George Campus of the University of Toronto. She is also the author of a chapter in the Picture a Professor project, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus.
Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here and to see both of you. [LAUGHTER]

John: Thanks for joining us. Our teas today are… Are you drinking tea?

Sarah: I am drinking tea. I have a…

Rebecca: Yay!

Sarah: …I wouldn’t miss it. …it’s a chocolate mint black tea by Sloane tea. They’re a Toronto tea company.

Rebecca: Awesome.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: I have a very standard [LAUGHTER] English breakfast today.

John: And I have a Prince of Wales tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, I haven’t had that in a while. John. We’ve invited you here today to discuss your chapter in Picture a Professor. Your chapter’s entitled “Sharing Our Stories to Build Community, Highlight Bias, and Address Challenges to Authority.” Can you tell us a little bit about this chapter?

Sarah: Yeah, sure. I think that my chapter might be the most obvious kind of strategy in this book. So a lot of the authors are sharing really inventive, or new strategies that I hadn’t thought of. Mine is all about just talking to other people about the challenges that we face when we don’t look like other professors in the academy, or at least what students might picture as their idea of a professor, what might you picture when you Google a professor? So my strategy is all about talking to people. First of all, starting by talking to colleagues, in particular, colleagues that might face similar challenges. So first of all, I should say, I’m a white woman, so I can’t speak to the full challenges that, for example, people of color might face, but I’m a math professor, and I present pretty feminine, and I teach mathematics in I guess, like a pretty serious math department. And so I certainly don’t look like what students expect when they come into a big math class. So for me, and I think for a lot of other people that I work with, it really came as a huge shock, when students started to question even my basic mathematical ability, 18 year olds dealing with probably their own insecurities about mathematics, but it was coming out as like, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. And then the reaction from my superiors who are mainly white men, would be to act more authoritative, basically act ways that were more like them. And the way that I felt was just like, there was something very, very wrong with me. I felt very ashamed. And even though I sensed that it had something to do with my identity, I knew they wouldn’t question me in the same way, if I was a typical looking professor, I also thought I did have to change something about myself. And there’s such tremendous shame in that. And it wasn’t until I, at the end of the year, whispered a little bit about it. And then another colleague said this exact same thing happened to me, the exact same thing. And the whole year, we were going through parallel experiences. And knowing that changed my life, it changed my profession. I would have left the academy if it hadn’t been for that. And then over time developing a group of cheerleaders who I could go to, and then kind of gain more confidence. My chapter also addresses being able to speak to colleagues and being able to speak to our students, because it’s important that they understand the challenges that we face, because we don’t just have white men who we teach, we teach a variety of students. And I think if we can talk about our personal challenges, and they can see that we also have faced challenges that they might be facing, then that can really be very transformative. So that’s kind of a brief summary of some of the things that I talk about.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how that unfolds in a classroom when you’re having those kinds of conversations with students in a math class?

Sarah: Yeah, so sometimes it unfolds very naturally, by some prompt that might happen. Yeah, there might be an extreme example. This past semester, I had another professor, he came in, and it was like, clear gender issue. And so I used that, in the next day actually, it took me a little while to react to it. And then the next day, we had a very deep conversation about gender in the classroom. But it might be before student evaluations, that has taken me a long time to come to, but how do you address the research about what students do in evaluations? Sometimes I assign reading about mathematicians’ experiences, I try to assign readings of biographies of diverse mathematicians, and then we relate it to their own experiences. And then if it’s appropriate, I don’t want to be all about me. But if it’s appropriate, I sometimes talk about what I’ve experienced. So those are some of the ways that it comes out. But I try to make my classrooms not just about the mathematics, because that’s really where the transformative stuff happens.

John: In terms of the teaching evaluations, have you addressed that issue specifically with students in terms of gender bias on evaluations before the evaluations? And has that helped? …because there is some research that making students aware of biases tends to reduce the amount of bias that shows up in the actual evaluations.

Sarah: It’s really hard for me to say if it helps.

John: …there’s no control group.

Sarah: Exactly. So even though I teach gigantic classes, you’d think that I’d be able to do some sort of like statistical thing, I have no idea if it really helps. I do get comments, after, if I do address it. I know that some students will say, “I’m not just saying this because she’s a woman.” So there is some backlash in that. So it’s unclear. I try not to do it right before the student evaluations, but like a few weeks before. I also do evaluations throughout the semester. And yes, it’s difficult to see if it impacts the evaluations or not. However, what is meaningful to me is not whether it impacts my evaluations, I think, but again, reaching the students who might not fall into those majority groups and helping them see that some bias stuff may be going on and it’s not all in my head and that is impacting my experience, and there’s actual research behind that.

Rebecca: I can imagine that students in a math class don’t expect to talk about identity. Can you talk a little bit about the student response to some of these conversations that you’ve had with students.

Sarah: It varies. I find that students are more and more open to it. I’ve taught a lot of first-year classes. So as they go through first year, they’re more open to it. Because at first, they’re like, “I just need all the math and they find a big change between high school and university in terms of the contact hours. So like you’re wasting our time talking about this stuff. But by upper-year classes, they find it such a refreshing change, because they’ve been in so many math classes, where it’s just all content, content, content. A lot of lectures. And so I really didn’t react to any of that backlash. And it’s almost like a breath of fresh air. And another aspect of identity that I think has been meaningful, like, has maybe come very naturally, the idea of like, “Are you a math person?” …because that’s another type of identity that’s really common in our society. And even that, it certainly linked gender and race, but it’s something that isn’t directly gender or race. And so talking about how that fits into their identity has also been a key to unlocking more personal conversation and getting them to really reflect on themselves in a mathematics classroom. Yeah, and I think one of the keys is like having them watch a mathematician talk about their work and how their identity is linked to their work. And then they comment, for example, Perusall or something where they can annotate the text, and then they start to get involved in some conversations, I can bring those comments into class and then we can have some pretty dynamic conversations.

Rebecca: I can imagine teaching first-year students in math with a societal “I’m not a math person” problem. I know, I teach in art and design, so we have a lot of students that claim that identity, “I’m not a math person, I don’t do math,” and are afraid. Can you talk about some of the ways that you have reduced the fear, allowed people to see themselves as being math people, even though they’ve never seen themselves in that way? I know you’ve had some really interesting things that you’ve done.

Sarah: Yeah, I love reaching those people. And it’s a lot more difficult now in my job at a big university than it was when I was teaching at a liberal arts school, where all students are required to take a math course. So maybe I’ll talk a little bit about my experiences at the liberal arts school to start. So I was at Quest University Canada, a small school, about 500 to 700 students. It kind of started as an experiment. And so we are encouraged to do all sorts of things. And we had a lot of students who were so afraid, just as you describe, of their mathematics course. And they were putting it off, putting it off, putting it off. And I think one of the things that really traps them is the idea that everything has to build on the thing before and a lot of them got lost somewhere in early elementary school and they never recovered. And it was some sort of threat to their identity, probably some like quick quiz or something. Someone said something, and they were lost, forever. So it’s trying to show them that well, there’s actually parts of mathematics that math majors don’t see until their fourth year that you can do right now. And that’s usually how I try to approach it. So I think one of the things is just addressing that head on, talking about their experiences in mathematics and telling them we’re going to do something different. You’re not going to see numbers, you’re not going to see arithmetic even, this is going to be about shapes and space and ideas, and maybe even accessing points of connection with individual students. So I can give examples of particular projects if you’d like or particular courses.

Rebecca: I’d love to hear an example of a project.

Sarah: Sure. I’m a firm believer that the things that you think are going to be total train wrecks can either turn out to be the best things you’ve ever done or they could be trainwrecks. But definitely my best things have been the wild ideas. So I was teaching a course on mathematical creativity. And it was going to attract a lot of students that were totally afraid of math because they had to take it as part of a series of courses on creativity. So they got to take a social science course on creativity and a chemistry course on creativity. But they also had to take this, in their minds, terrible math course on creativity. So I was really excited to teach it. But how would you describe the feeling of creating something new in mathematics. And for me, and for most mathematicians, if you hear like these quotes about mathematics, they’re like mathematicians will say “math is like poetry. Math is like…” …they give all these analogies with very creative analogies. But most students don’t access that until graduate school, because there’s not this freedom of exploration. So I spend a lot of time just wondering, how do I feel creative? How do students feel creative? And it was really only on research that I felt really creative? So, how can I model research for students? So what I ultimately did was, I asked them, first of all, I didn’t tell them where we were going, cause there’s going to be a two-stage project centerpiece of this course. And first stage is you have to define something from geometry, but it can’t be like anything you’ve ever defined before. So one group defined, they called it like an ice cream cone shape. So it was a triangle with like a circle in it. And then we really worked on making their definition mathematically. So how does the triangle touch the circle, another group to defined a caterpillar shape in a precise way. And then the second part of the project, after they have their definition they couldn’t change was to discover as much about that object as they could. And they were only graded on how, on their journals, how much time they spent thinking about it, and how much they talk to other people. And I’m telling you, the ideas that these students had, and the level of mathematics that these totally math-phobic students did, was incredible. It was what I would expect from fourth-year students. And they were starting to use the word theorems and proofs. I said, you don’t have to prove anything, I just want you to like discover things, but they were coming to it naturally. And it was amazing. I could just gush about all the things that they did forever, like all of the discoveries that they made for themselves. And I still hear from these students about the impact that this project had from them, I don’t know, six or seven years ago now. So yeah, that’s one of my favorites. But at the time, I thought, Oh, this might go really poorly.

Rebecca: It’s amazing how the freedom to explore and discover can really open up the freedom to see yourself in a new way, or to be a researcher in a different way. As you were talking, I’m remembering an opportunity I had as an early faculty member workshop. And it was a multi-day workshop with mathematicians, and I was the non-mathematician, to help develop curriculum. And I had never hung out with math folks that much before. But it was really interesting. And we had really interesting conversations about creativity and the overlaps of our work that neither of us had recognized before. So it’s really interesting how those opportunities to have those conversations, whether with students or with colleagues can open up so many possibilities.

Sarah: Yeah, there’s so much and I’ve learned so much from my first year-students who are interested in some very diverse things, and they brought a lot to, like I was gonna say, my teaching, but like, also, just me personally, [LAUGHTER] I think they really enrich my life.

John: And you have taught some interesting classes, including a first-year seminar course in math and literature and poetry. And another one was women’s mathematics. Could you tell us a little bit about each of those classes and how you’ve used that to get students more engaged with math?

Sarah: Sure. So both of them are at the University of Toronto, I will probably do it as U of T at some point, which is not University of Texas for American listeners. And in part they were written to try to attract students who might not traditionally sign up for a math course, all of our first-year courses are massive at U of T, except for these first-year seminars, which are capped at, I think, 25. So really, students’ opportunity for a small class experience. So the math of literature and poetry, I think some of the seeds were planted, actually, by one of the students in that math creativity class. She was a poet, and she identified herself as a poet as a first-year student, and she was also very afraid of math, but she kept finding linkages. And she said, “You know, I think this can help me with my poetry.” And I am totally not a poetry person at all, or I certainly wasn’t, I’m maybe more now. And so that started to get me thinking about like, maybe if I combine math with like a poetry course, I could engage some other students. And she’s one of those students that I still talk to you and she just got her MFA in poetry and still using her math. So I talked to her actually, in developing this course. She helped me a little bit on the poetry side, also a key part in the math and literature and poetry is I had a TA from English because, again, I’m not a specialist. So I needed someone to help me and she was wonderful, a PhD student in literature. So I think another source of inspiration that was also integrated into it was that I had taught novels previously and seen how novels helped students relate to mathematicians or see themselves as mathematicians. I was just amazed at like how much empathy they had for the characters. So we read novels like about mathematicians, like the Housekeeper and the Professor, a really great Japanese novel in translation. And then there was mathematics from novels. So for example, one of our key novels, or a story, of the Library of Babel by Borges and you can actually ask, what is the shape of this library? What could the topology of it be in mathematical language? So then that was a key for investigating topology.

John: Was a library closed or open?

Sarah: Yeah, [LAUGHTER], exactly, that sort of question. We can start to narrow it down. So that was the math in literature and poetry course, in terms of content. The woman’s mathematics course is still kind of growing in my mind. It’s been in the works for a really long time. I just like us to center it almost like an experiential learning course, where the object of study was the university or like the mathematics in our university itself. And so as a result of both history and modern mathematics, and all sorts of things, I decided one of our units was going to be on data visualization, which is a little bit more number focus than I often have in first-year seminars, but people are often surprised that like Florence Nightingale was not just a friendly nurse, she was [LAUGHTER] an amazing data scientist. And she was really one of the first people to bring some of these amazing data visualizations, and she’s an amazing statistician, all these things. And there’s also a lot of women in this space currently. So their project was like, well take some data about the math department, maybe, or students in the math department and find an appropriate visualization for it. And they generated stuff that we really haven’t seen, like, what does it look like in our departments to have 13% woman faculty. You can say it all you want, but to actually see it with like the people, it is actually pretty startling to me. And then another project with that course, was we worked with a university archivist, and went into the university archives. So our university has a long and storied history, we hold ourselves up as a great research university. So we have many illustrious women in the past who have studied here, but people don’t know about them. And since I would say, we have a pretty bad situation with women in our department now, people kind of assume, after this archives project, I would go around and I would ask people, “When do you think the first woman president of the math student union was?” and people would say, “Oh, there’s never been a woman president. Like, are you kidding?” Because that’s the way it looks like now. But the answer is actually 1910 or something. And there were strong women, like way back when. And so students went to the University Archives, they looked at student records, they looked at faculty records, they looked at photos, and they told some stories from that. So that’s a project that’s gonna continue for a future class.

Rebecca: Sounds really interesting, and a great way to get students engaged with many different mathematical ideas, but also really engaged with this idea of identity related to disciplines.

Sarah: Yeah. And another thing that it did is it also helped them see themselves as part of the university because it was the first semester of the academic year, they were first-year students, and so it helped them see themselves as part of the community.

Rebecca: We don’t, in our curricula, look at the history of our university as part of what’s informing our work or informing the students. And so I can imagine that that’s a really unique kind of experience that could happen in any discipline, that would be a really interesting opportunity for students to just better understand their traditions that they’re coming out of.

Sarah: And I think our university archivist wants to work with classes, like they’re so excited to see, especially first year classes, get us to coming there and being part of that aspect of the university. I’m always a big fan of all of our librarians and I know that you guys are too,

Rebecca: You should see my notepad right now. It actually says “go see our archivist” because him and I had a conversation about a project we could do with my class. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Yeah, they’re wonderful.

John: Often, archivists are working in rooms all alone by themselves. And in fact, ours do work in the basement. And the opportunity to engage with students is good for them, as well as for students. That sounds like a really engaging project.

Rebecca: I’m ready to sign up for all of these classes. So I hope you have room.

Sarah: You are welcome to come and even speak and spread your wisdom, I would love that. [LAUGHTER]

John: Speaking of room… you also have taught some introductory calculus classes with up to 3000 students in them and you transformed them into an online environment along with a colleague during COVID. Could you tell us a little bit about how that course was structured and how it changed when you went to remote teaching?

Rebecca: It sounds so daunting.

Sarah: Oh, okay. So COVID for everyone has been really, really tough. And especially that I always have to go back and think what year was that? 2020 to 21 academic year…, everyone had it really, really tough. So we all like deserve, like hero badges or something, and I’m ready for a break. So I think we all need to catch up on our rest still from that. But I was fortunate because before the pandemic was on anyone’s radar, we had already arranged kind of a transition point in my job where I was going to be going from coordinating this gigantic introductory calculus class to not coordinating it. And the new coordinator, my colleague, Bernardo Galvao-Sousa, he was going to take over it. We were going to have a one year overlap, so he could kind of see how I did it and just like everything was gonna go normal and then he was gonna take over. So that overlap year was to be the 2020 to 21 academic year. So it was fortunate that we were both able to work on it, I don’t know how it would have happened otherwise. I had already been in a period of transforming this class, it had been basically the same from no one really knows, like, as far as anyone could remember, it had been the same. And I was basically brought on and hired at University of Toronto, to bring it to the 21st-century. So over the past three years before that, I had been changing it completely. And then, of course, we went online, which required it to be rethought because you can’t teach a course for 1000s of students the same way. So what was the course like before? Well, we have a lot of rules in our university for first-year courses, in that they have to have a midterm, they have to have a final exam worth a certain weight, there were three one-hour lectures a week, one one-hour tutorial, kind of the whole structure was pretty traditional. But I had been introducing some innovative projects, we were shaking things up in how we did them in tutorials. And the whole curriculum was really modernized. So I’ll give an example of one aspect of the course, the applied communication task, and how we transformed that aspect of the course, to put it online and still give students hopefully as good of an experiences as they could online. So applied communication tasks were this word project. So first semester, they were three separate projects, second semester it was one project, they were applied, and they were about mathematical communication. And I’m a big believer that I don’t really invent many new ideas, I just kind of like look at the needs of my students in my place and try to adapt things from elsewhere. So I had talked to every department that took my students after so this was like a calculus course for science students. And so they were going, the majority to life sciences, but they were also going to chemistry, they were going to physics, some are going to earth sciences. And then some are going to psychology and some at some other smaller departments, not smaller departments, but smaller portions are going to other departments. I guess economics was another big one. And I talked to them about like, what skills don’t students have that they should have from calculus? And one of the big themes was that students were afraid, they were just afraid to approach math in new context. So they could solve all the problems that were traditional, but they couldn’t if they saw a scientific paper, and there’s math, they were like, “I’m not familiar with this math, what do I do?” So I really took that as inspiration like, well, we should have students do that very thing. So as an aside, I put questions like that in exams, like, you know, take problems from scientific papers, give them information and put them on exams. But then also, in the second semester, have them find a scientific paper that has a mathematical model. And ultimately, the goal is to communicate something about that scientific model. Now, what form should that communication be in? Well, one common form that scientists use is a scientific poster. And the advantage of that is that it could be kind of an event, it can be kind of a grand finale for the course in tutorials. So we had a bunch of mini-poster sessions with about 100 students each. And so each of the posters presented models. They got into groups, kind of halfway through the semester, they combined some of their papers, but that took them through the experience of talking to a librarian and having to deal with databases. It got them through finding what’s important and what’s not. Well, I don’t understand… really this is way over my head in terms of math… what can I say from this model, and so all those skills like that, and then also the kind of communication. And it also combined oral communication where they have to talk about their poster and written communication, they had to write about their poster and they really worked on different drafts of different parts of their poster, and they have to read. First semester, the projects prepare them for that. They had a project that was focused on written communication, that was writing a proposal to their city council based on population projections from their hometown. They had a reading task and that’s changed a little bit over the years. So that’s what it was. What we did online is we basically kept the same projects, except instead of having the sprinkled in the tutorial, like every second or third tutorial was about the project, now we knew that they’re at home, they do not have any resources, any people around, we really need to make these be focused tutorial and make the structure very, very, very clear. Because otherwise, this really complex project is just gonna get completely confusing. We structured the first semester in that the first three tutorials were focused on writing. And the second three tutorials were focused on reading. And the third three tutorials were focused on oral communication. And then within that, the first tutorial had the same structure, the second tutorial had the same structure. And the third tutorial had the same structure. So they kind of had something much more predictable. And there was like a lot more evenness, and we didn’t try to give them as many skills as we did in the in-person, we cut down the expectations, we trimmed as much as possible. And then something similar in the second semester, we trimmed a lot, we focused a lot, we didn’t aim as high on the exams, in terms of all of those questions from scientific papers. We didn’t have exams, instead of exams, we had three different types of quizzes, the fun type was reflection quizzes, which had them reflect on their learning sometimes, or maybe conduct some sort of experiment at home, and then use that and make a model or something to like, go on a walk, this was in the deep COVID In the fall of 2020. And so like go on a walk, if you can’t go on a walk outside, go on a walk around your house and find something to model. So some people are modeling bird chirps or whatever. And then you create your own scientific models. And if you have two to three thousand students spread around the world, obviously, cheating is a huge concern. So we tried as much as possible to make it interesting. And for me, like, yes, academic integrity is big, but it was the perception of academic integrity amongst the students. Like we really wanted to keep them engaged.

John: So how did you assess and evaluate all those quizzes? Did you have a large team of TAs?

Sarah: We had very limited TA hours actually. So I think that’s another part of big course stuff that we don’t talk about a lot. It’s actually something I’ve been writing about, I’m just not sure where to send it because we don’t talk about it. It’s like management, like how do you manage a large organization? So we have about 50 people. How do you distribute your resources, and we have very limited resources. So we wanted to do these quizzes, we want to them very well, we have very few TAs and we still wanted TAs to teach tutorials. What are we gonna do? So what we ended up doing is redistributed our instructor resources. And normally students would be in classes of 200 in person. And we had them in classes of 400 online, because we figured the difference between an online class of 200 and an online class of 400 was not going to make a big difference. And technology, I can go into all the technological challenges. Now, the technology is all there. But August 2020, breakout rooms for this large of groups, impossible. So we had to do all these Zoom, and it’s crazy stuff. That’s how we managed is we had instructors who were like just in charge of quizzes. And that’s how we did it. And then every third quiz was kind of the automatically graded kind.

Rebecca: I think it’s important to bring up some of these logistics or project management skills the faculty have to have, especially when coordinating such big courses. And I appreciate that you’re sharing some of those things, because you’re right, we don’t talk about it. Just like we don’t talk about those same experiences that we have as young female faculty in the classroom or whatever kind of identities that impact our experiences.

Sarah: Exactly. Yeah. And both of these are the things that really keep me awake at night. It’s not the actual teaching, it’s the “How am I going to possibly grade?” [LAUGHTER] Or like, “How can I negotiate with my chair for more hours per students?” Or “What are you going to do with that one TA who’s behaving inappropriately with students?” It’s all of these extra things. Very, very, very different if you’re doing even a class to 500 versus a class of a few 1000 is quite different because you can’t see it all.

Rebecca: Yeah, managing an equitable experience is a really different kind of thing. It just keeps scaling up. So finding that equity piece is a challenge.

John: But it is impressive that you did those reflection quizzes at that scale, because that’s something I’ve wanted to do, but have been a little reluctant to do in a class of 400 that I teach in the fall. And now this is suggesting maybe I should do some of that. [LAUGHTER] Providing the feedback is the main concern that I have.

Sarah: Yeah, well, I think for gigantic classes. I don’t know however, we defined gigantic, like I guess gigantic versus the thing that you want to do. It’s often like what’s really the priority here and then what can you sacrifice, like, there’s always going to have to be a sacrifice. So I can’t provide the same feedback on a quiz to a group of 2,000 students as I can for a group of 20 students, or the classes that I had this year were in the low hundreds. And I can’t provide them the level of feedback that I had like on everything. But using peer feedback can be helpful, or just explaining to them, I can’t provide you feedback on this. If you want more feedback, you’re going to have to seek it, which is hard I know and not ideal. However, these are the things that we face, or just like deciding that the grading scale is going to be really generous and loose. I experimented this last semester in class of like 300-ish students with not ungrading, but more this [LAUGHTER] direction, letting them determine a lot more of their achievement levels, trusting them to say, “Oh, yes, I have mastered this actually.”

Rebecca: Well, now you’ve piqued our interest and we need to know more about it.

Sarah: Yeah, like, I’m still kind of thinking about how to describe it or characterize it because I started off with a structure. And then I really let the semester go on and adjusted as I saw my students change and as I changed myself. So I don’t have a lot of eloquent ways to discuss it. This is a upper-year course for group theory. And I wanted to do a lot of things that I just didn’t have the resources for. So I had to make a lot of tough decisions. And also, we are in a super grade-intensive university. And by the time they’re in like, third year, this is so ingrained in their mind. And this particular course has a very high percentage of international students, probably over 80% international students. And in my university, I think that they tend to be more concerned about grades because they have to be and somehow, just like not giving them grades on anything. [LAUGHTER] Like saying, “Okay, you’ve either mastered this, or you’re excellent on this, or you’re not there yet” was really difficult at first, a lot of them dropped the course immediately, because they didn’t understand it. They were like, “what percentage is this?” And I’m like, “Well, there is no percent.” “Well, is it 100?” I think they did not understand the concept of it at all. So I wanted to focus on oral skills, and oral skills are so hard to assess. But I want to give them the opportunity to develop their oral skills, I didn’t really want to assess them as much as I wanted to make sure that they were speaking about math and they were talking about math to other people. They could reattempt any assignment they wanted. So, they did a test, they could show me that they had actually learned the material on the test. But they had to talk to other people about it, they had to demonstrate they had spoken to other people, a lot of the main things like videos, and one group organized a mini conference on the topics for the weekend. They did a lot of amazing thing as a result of this. And the TAs provided very targeted feedback. So we’ve provided feedback on the skills that we knew students needed feedback on. So, they needed feedback on particular cognitive skills that they were not able to assess, like research has shown that they are not able to assess their own proofs, or students are not able to provide that same feedback. That’s what we assess. But we didn’t bother assessing things we didn’t care about.

Rebecca: It’s an interesting way of thinking about it. I know that I also was experimenting a little bit with ungrading this past semester, and also found that international students are the most like, “I don’t know what this means.”

Sarah: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, you have to just admit, sometimes, you don’t really understand it. Also a good opportunity for discussion for students, and talking about what that means when we don’t really understand.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think it’s good to model that.

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

Sarah: Well, I just submitted my tenure file two days ago.

Rebecca: YAY!

Sarah: So I need to catch up on a couple of things, but then rest. I have not had a good opportunity since the beginning [LAUGHTER] of the pandemic, so I think that that’s going to be my answer. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: That sounds like a wonderful plan. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: And great advice for everybody listening. [LAUGHTER] We can all use a little rest.

Sarah: We all need that reminder.

John: And we should note that this is the first time that Rebecca and I have recorded in the same room since March of 2020. So this is sort of a return to normalcy for us.

Rebecca: Yeah. So it was nice to share this experience with you, Sarah.

Sarah: Yeah, it was so nice to talk to both of you and to see you together. [LAUGHTER] So, I know that listeners can’t see you, but I have enjoyed seeing you and speaking with you.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us. 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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212. Faculty Mindset

Posted in equity, first-generation students, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, learning, pedagogy, race, STEM, STEM education, teaching
November 3, 2021

Research on the impact of mindset has often centered on the mindset of the student. In this episode, Elizabeth Canning joins us to discuss the impact that faculty mindset has on student achievement. Elizabeth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Washington State University. Her research focuses on how to create equitable and inclusive instructional environments.

Show Notes
Transcript

Shownotes

Muenks, K., Canning, E. A., LaCosse, J., Green, D. J., Zirkel, S., Garcia, J. A., & Murphy, M. C. (2020). Does my professor think my ability can change? Students’ perceptions of their STEM professors’ mindset beliefs predict their psychological vulnerability, engagement, and performance in class. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(11), 2119.
Harackiewicz, J. M., Canning, E. A., Tibbetts, Y., Priniski, S. J., & Hyde, J. S. (2016). Closing achievement gaps with a utility-value intervention: Disentangling race and social class. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(5), 745.
Bauer, Angela. (2018). “Closing the performance gap.” Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 49. October 3.
Canning, E. A., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2015). Teach it, don’t preach it: The differential effects of directly-communicated and self-generated utility–value information. Motivation Science, 1(1), 47.

Transcript

John: Research on the impact of mindset has often centered on the mindset of the student. In this episode, we discuss the impact faculty mindset has on student achievement.

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

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

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

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

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John: Our guest today is Elizabeth Canning. Elizabeth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Washington State University. Her research focuses on how to create equitable and inclusive instructional environments. Welcome, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Thank you.

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

Elizabeth: I’m drinking water today.

Rebecca: Alright, still a good choice. The base of tea, of course.

Elizabeth: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have a restricted set of tea because I brought most of my tea back up to the office, but I’ve been sent home with COVID. So I do have a ginger peach black tea still here though.

Rebecca: That sounds like a pretty standard fare.

John: It is.

Rebecca: I made it out to that tea shop I’ve discovered. And so I have a new one called Yunnan Jig…

Elizabeth: Ooh!

Rebecca: …and it’s a golden-tipped black tea.

Elizabeth: That sounds delicious.

Rebecca: It is very delicious.

Elizabeth: Exotic teas.

John: We’ve invited you here today to talk about your 2019 study that examined the effect of instructor mindset on racial achievement gaps in STEM disciplines. Could you tell us a little bit about this study?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So this study was a study that we did while I was a postdoc at Indiana. It was in collaboration with Dr. Mary Murphy, Katie Muenks, and Dorraine Green. We were really interested in instructor beliefs about intelligence… so whether they believe that intelligence is something that is innate, something that you’re just born with, you can’t change it very much, we call that a fixed mindset. And what we also call a growth mindset is this belief that intelligence can grow over time and change with effort, strategies, help-seeking, things like that. And we were interested in whether instructors’ beliefs about intelligence then predicted the experiences that students have in their classes, and then how well they do in their classes. So we sent a survey out to the whole university, and we didn’t expect a whole lot of responses because faculty are busy and all of that. But we actually got a lot of responses. We had 150 STEM faculty respond to our survey. And so with that, we were able to link their survey responses to the grades in their courses over a two-year period. And we ended up with this fantastic rich data set that we were able to look at students’ grades in their courses.

Rebecca: How prevalent was the fixed mindset amongst the faculty that you surveyed?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So it was pretty normally distributed, shockingly so I think. A lot of people think that fixed mindsets might be more rare. Other people think fixed mindset might be extremely prevalent, but it was pretty normally distributed. It’s a continuous scale so if you graph it, it’s a pretty normal curve. So we’ve got the most people in the middle. And then we’ve got some people at each extreme. But what’s interesting when you look at it, though, is especially on this scale, most people, they won’t go extreme, like the very, very tip of the fixed mindset scale. But they’ll do the next level over. It’s like, “I’m not gonna be that person, but I’ll be right next to it.” So it’s interesting to think about that when you think about the profession of being an instructor, and part of your job is to educate people. But yet we’re finding a significant amount of people have this mindset that intelligence or abilities can’t change.

Rebecca: So you talked about it being a normal distribution, was there any variation amongst race or gender, ethnicity, age, or STEM discipline?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So we get that question a lot. Like, can we predict who it is that has the fixed mindset? Well, this is the only table I’ve ever published that had every single line in it non-significant. [LAUGHTER] So we tested pretty much everything in our data set—whether mindset differed by gender, by faculty race, by age, by teaching experience, tenure status, anything that we had in our data set—and we found no differences by mindset. So it seems like having a fixed mindset or having a growth mindset is prevalent among all faculty regardless of these characteristics. We also looked within departments because a lot of people want to think that it’s, “Oh, it’s those economists or…” [LAUGHTER] looking at you, John. Or, “It’s those computer scientists, or the physicists, or the mathematicians.” But we didn’t find any differences by discipline. So faculty in any kind of discipline can endorse a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. And this suggests that these mindsets are not going to resolve itself on its own. Like if this was a generational thing, then we would expect it to resolve over time, or we could go into a specific discipline and educate faculty, but it seems to be pretty widespread, regardless of these characteristics.

John: That was one of the most surprising things in your study, to me. I was expecting that this would vary, particularly with age, but also perhaps with gender as well. And I was thinking that maybe this would be better over time. One of my favorite quotes from Paul Samuelson, an economist who died a while back, was, “funeral by funeral, the science makes progress,” and I was kind of hoping that that might occur with growth mindsets here, too. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

Rebecca: So we’re left with saying, “Great…” [LAUGHTER]

John: When you were looking at the effect of instructor mindset on student grades, were you also controlling for the characteristics of the students as well?

Elizabeth: Yes. So we controlled for a number of things in our analyses, we wanted to put anything in the model that might predict student performance. So we controlled for whether the student was the first in their family to go to college, their first-generation status. We controlled for their prior achievement level, so their prior GPA before they enrolled in that class. We also controlled for a number of course characteristics. So whether the course was, at this university, a 100 level, 200, 300. So, like, an entry-level class versus more of an upper-division class or upper-level class. We controlled for a number of faculty characteristics as well, like whether they were tenured, their age, how long they had been teaching. And so all of that was in the model to control for those variations in terms of what predicts their grades. Because a number of things we know predict grades, like class size. If it’s a bigger class versus a smaller class, we know that’s a pretty robust finding. And so we controlled for that in all of the analyses.

John: What was the overall effect, controlling for all the other student and instructor characteristics, of instructor mindset on student grades?

Elizabeth: So students, on average, received a higher grade in faculty’s classes where they endorsed more of a growth mindset. And this was, again, controlling for all of those things, regardless of student characteristics, class characteristics, and faculty characteristics. We also looked at this by student race, so we found an interaction with student race. So it’s not just that everybody on average is receiving or earning higher grades in the growth-mindset courses. This is particularly true for students with racial- ethnic minority status. So Black, Hispanic, Native American students performed better in the courses that had faculty who endorsed more of a growth mindset. When we look at the achievement gap between White and Asian students compared to Black, Hispanic, and Native American students, we see that this racial achievement gap is twice as large when the faculty endorsed more of a fixed mindset, compared to when they endorsed more of a growth mindset.

Rebecca: Can we talk a little bit about differences in assessments or the way that courses are structured between the fixed-mindset faculty courses versus the growth-mindset courses, because I think your paper talked a little bit about that as well, right, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth: We couldn’t dig into the specifics of it just because of the scale of this project, but we’ve done a lot of follow-up to see: What is it that faculty are doing in these classes? Because students are obviously picking up on it. It’s not just the belief that you hold near and dear to your heart, this is something that is being communicated to students in some way. And what we know from our other research is that it’s communicated in a lot of ways depending on the instructor, depending on the class. So it can be communicated in your course policies, like how you design your syllabus, how many assessments you give in your class. So, fixed-mindset professors are more likely to have a midterm and a final, and that’s your only opportunity to display your abilities in that class. Whereas the growth-mindset professors are more likely to have weekly quizzes where you can improve over time and see that improvement over time. And mistakes are less deadly in those classes, so to speak. So it’s in the way they design their courses, but it’s also in subtle ways. So what they say in class, how they talk to students who are struggling in their office hours, it’s in their attitude, it’s in a lot of different behavior. And students are pretty perceptive, they can pick up on it pretty quickly.

John: So we can significantly reduce racial achievement gaps if instructors have growth mindsets. Is instructor mindset something that’s changeable?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think so. We know a lot from trying to change students’ mindset beliefs, it’s actually pretty malleable. You can teach people the science behind how our abilities grow over time, the changes that occur in your brain in terms of neuroplasticity, and faculty are pretty receptive to that. Most faculty want to do things that are going to benefit their students, most faculty want to be good instructors. And so it might just be finding ways to communicate that. In some of our research, we’ve found a disconnect between what faculty think their mindset is and how they’re communicating that, to what students are actually perceiving. And so it might just be communication, making sure that you’re very explicit about what you believe in your class, standing up on the first day and saying, “Here’s what I believe about abilities and intelligence, you don’t have to be, quote-unquote, ‘smart’ to do well in this class. Here are other ways to do well in this class, like learning and improving and using different strategies and things like that.” We also know that there are very critical times where these messages matter more. So there are times during the semester where students are searching for information about their abilities. So when you hand back that first exam grade, or that first assessment that you give in your class, that’s the perfect time to communicate your mindset beliefs, particularly if they’re a growth mindset. Because students are searching, “What does this mean? Does this mean that I’m good at this? Does this mean that I’m not good at this? Am I going to do well, should I drop this course?” It’s a time of uncertainty for students. And so, for faculty to communicate those beliefs during that critical time, it can set forth sort of the snowball effect for how they should view their learning and improvement throughout the semester. There’s a number of ways that faculty can do this in their classes. But back to your original question about, “Can we change faculties’ mindset?” I think so. I think there’s a lot of literature suggesting that we can do that.

Rebecca: And there’s been a lot of money pumped into making these STEM pipelines in the first place. We want them to be effective. So investing in this education around mindset and learning might be a really good use of funds.

Elizabeth: Yeah, one of the things that I think was really shocking about this paper is the faculty that reported their mindset beliefs, there were 150 of them. But when you look at all of the students that they touch, over a two-year period, how many people they teach, it becomes a really big number pretty quickly. So in this sample it was around 15,000 students that these 150 faculty taught over a two-year period. And so, instead of intervening with 15,000 students, you might intervene with 150 people and see similar or maybe even greater effect.

Rebecca: I know from our experience, John, with working with faculty around mindset and around helping students learn how they learn, that faculty who demonstrate a growth mindset are often very willing to share what they’ve learned about learning with their students. And so having an intervention with 150 people then reaches many of those students, because that information ends up being communicated out in a more distributed way.

John: One thing I’m wondering is whether you can separate out, in these results, the impacts of the way in which people teach from the messaging that’s coming up indirectly in other ways? It strikes me that that may not be possible, in that the instructors with a growth mindset provide lots of opportunities for students to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, while those who have a fixed mindset are more likely just, as you said, to use a small number of exams as high-stakes assessments. Is it possible that some of the effect is just from better teaching practices and using more evidence-based teaching approaches that give students these opportunities for more retrieval practice, more spaced practice, and so forth?

Elizabeth: I think that’s very possible. However, we’ve done some follow-up research where we randomized faculty messages within one course. So it’s the same professor, it’s the same structure, some students are getting growth-mindset messages from that instructor, some students are just getting control messages, and we’re seeing really great effects at that level. And so it has to be more than just the way their course is structured. It’s more about the messages that they’re giving students and how to frame mistakes, how to frame ability. We’re providing it at a specific time like I mentioned earlier, and so it’s probably a combination of both. But with this new experimental evidence at the student level, or at the classroom level, we’re seeing that it’s more than just their teaching ability, or the way that their course is structured.

John: What you just described reminds me of a podcast we had done a while back with Angela Bauer at High Point University in Episode 49. In that episode, she talked about trying to reduce some of the achievement gap in their introductory biology classes. And they first introduced some active-learning activities, but there was still a non-trivial achievement gap remaining. So they introduced some growth mindset messaging, and that seemed to remove the remaining racial achievement gaps. So that provides a little bit further evidence that growth mindset messaging can play a significant role in helping to reduce these achievement gaps.

Rebecca: One thing that’s really powerful about that idea, though, is that it may not really take a lot to make a change.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Rebecca: It doesn’t really seem like that much of a financial investment, or even a time investment to make a difference, or at least chip away at the problem a little.

Elizabeth: I think that’s what makes this so appealing to people is because it’s subtle, and it’s also something that can be done pretty easily. So you’re not changing the curriculum, you’re not flipping your classroom that requires extra work and time. Faculty are already overloaded with the expectations of what they’re supposed to be doing with teaching in terms of all their other responsibilities. We have implemented mindset messages at a pretty really basic level. So putting messages in a syllabus, putting messages in an email, maybe a couple videos in the class, for instance. And that’s really it. As long as it’s done in a way where it’s at a critical time, it’s more meaningful for students, and it’s done sincerely, then it’s not a whole lot of extra work.

John: From a faculty member’s side though, for those who may have a fixed mindset who believe that students’ ability is fixed, a conversion to a growth mindset may very well, and that’s consistent with your results, change the way in which they structure their courses. Because if you believe that students can learn by making mistakes and practice, you’re probably going to redesign your courses to build more of that in and that’s, again, very consistent with what you found. And it will be a bit more work typically for instructors unless they can do it in a way in which there’s some degree of automation.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of discussion around rigor, and if you have a growth mindset that it means you’re too soft, and you’re not having a difficult class. So it brings up all these questions about course difficulty and rigor. And I think our perspective and some of the follow-up work that we’ve done in this paper, and in other papers, that the perspective of what is difficult or what is rigorous really depends on who you ask. So if you ask a faculty member how difficult their class is, or what it means to have a difficult class, that’s going to vary quite dramatically from the students’ perspective. So what we’ve seen is that students actually find the growth-mindset professors to be a little bit more difficult or challenging than the fixed-mindset professors, and it’s for that very reason that they have more work to do in the class. [LAUGHTER] They have to make improvements, and they have to redo assignments, and the workload is maybe even a little bit higher, versus a fixed mindset class that might have a midterm or a final, there’s less, quote-unquote, “work” to do in that class. And so it really is in the eye of the beholder what class is difficult and what that means in terms of student achievement.

Rebecca: There’s a difference in regular accountability…

Elizabeth: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: …and therefore feels like a lot more work when you’re being held accountable on a regular basis. [LAUGHTER]

Elizabeth: Yeah, I’ve done some follow-up work, because a lot of people will also think that it just comes down to being nice. If you’re nice and warm and friendly, then people are going to do well in your class, and if you’re not, then people will not do well in your class. And so I’ve done an experiment where we have manipulated that. There’s a laboratory study that we’ve done, where we manipulate whether the message is a fixed-mindset or a growth-mindset message. And then we manipulate whether that message is delivered in a way that’s warm and friendly and positive, versus cold and unfriendly. So this results in four different ways of messaging. The best is always going to be sort of this warm, friendly growth mindset, and the worst is always going to be the cold, unfriendly fixed-mindset. But what’s really interesting is what happens to the two in the middle. If you have the growth mindset but you’re cold and unapproachable, versus a fixed mindset and warm and approachable, How do those two shake out? And what we’re finding is that, very consistently, it’s the mindset message that matters more than the warmth or approachability. So they do interact, of course, it’s good to be warm and friendly. But the message itself also matters. So we can tease these things apart. They are different things, and they have different effects.

John: Since we’ve got you here, we were looking through some of your other research, and you’ve done a number of studies that have looked at the impact of utility-value interventions. Could you talk about what those are, and what you’ve found involving those?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So a lot of the research I’ve done on utility-value interventions was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Judy Harackiewicz at Wisconsin, Madison. And so, utility-value intervention is an intervention that’s directed at students. The way that we implement it is we have students write a short essay. They pick a topic that they’ve covered in class, and they write about how that topic is useful or relevant to them personally. And the way that we’ve done this, we’ve had them do it a couple different times throughout the semester. So they’re reflecting on what they’re learning and they’re connecting it to their own personal goals, their life, and it makes the material that they’re learning more relevant to them. And what we’ve found is that this intervention is particularly beneficial for underrepresented racial minority students who are also the first in their family to go to college. So this group is doubly disadvantaged, they’re disadvantaged due to race, they’re also disadvantaged due to social class. These students have the largest achievement gap in most STEM courses, and they really connect with this intervention. What we found in this research, these students have a particular motivation for going into science. They want to give back to their communities, they want to help their friends and family out after they’re done with college. They have specific goals that may not be met in science courses, or may not have this direct connection to what they’re learning in science. And so, by providing them with this opportunity to reflect on that and connect the material to those goals, we’re seeing that they make marked improvement in terms of their grades in the class. Whenever you do an intervention where you have students write something, and you get really rich data because you can look at what they’re writing about. So we analyzed over 1,000 different essays that these students wrote and we said, “What are they writing about?” We ran them through the linguistic analysis, and they’re really connecting it to those goals. These students are more engaged in the assignment, they’re writing longer essays, they’re more specific in their writing. And that then contributes to learning more in the class, which results in higher grades.

Rebecca: Sounds like, again, a very easy intervention to make or to build into classes. I know that I’ve been doing more of that in the classes that I’m teaching and seeing really good results and having really great conversations as a result with students as well.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think there’s a difference between simplicity and ease of this type of intervention, because it does require the students to put in some effort, they have to write an essay. It also requires some grading on the part of the instructor if that’s not already in your class. So it is a little bit extra, quote-unquote, “work”. But I think it can be done in automated ways to benefit students.

John: And in these studies, you’ve also looked at the effect of student-identified value versus when it’s communicated from the instructor instead. Could you talk a little bit about the relative impact of directly-communicated utility-value interventions from the instructor or those that come from the students?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So from a really practical perspective, we wanted to know, “Do students have to write the essay? [LAUGHTER] Do we have to grade all these essays? Or can we just stand up in front of the students and sort of give them this information, kind of summarize how what they’re learning is relevant to a number of domains?” Because that would ultimately, in a practical sense, take less time. So we did an experiment where we manipulated this, and what we found is that students benefit the most when they get both. So they have a little bit of scaffolding from the faculty member, where they’re given some ideas of how the information might be relevant or useful to them. And then they write about it in their own words and get really into specifics. So a professor can stand up there and say a bunch of ways that it might be relevant, but every student is unique, every student has different goals, every student has different interests. And so, it really needs to be personalized to them. And the process of putting it in your own words and reflecting on it is also useful, right? That’s part of the learning process. You get into the specifics of it and write about it. So, we ended up concluding that it’s both. There’s some scaffolding involved from the faculty member, but then the students really need to generate something for themselves too.

John: I think you also looked at this in terms of the differential effect in two-year and four-year institutions, and you found somewhat different results between a community college and a four-year institution. Could you talk a little bit about that difference?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So a lot of this research has been done, or the data have been collected from four-year institutions, particularly four-year research-intensive institutions. And so, I wanted to see how this could translate to other types of colleges, particularly in the two-year context, because a lot of first-generation students go to two-year colleges. That’s a gateway to a lot of different career paths. And so what we did is we went around to a whole bunch of different two-year colleges, we connected with the instructors there, we tried to tailor it for their students and their context. But ultimately, what we found is that there needed to be a lot more scaffolding in terms of the writing process. So because the intervention was done with students at four-year colleges, we kind of made assumptions about how ready students were to think about utility and think about relevance. And a writing intervention in those contexts just wasn’t appropriate. So we didn’t find the same findings, we actually found that the control essays were more beneficial than the utility-value condition, in these interventions that control is summarizing course material. And that was actually really beneficial for students in this context because they weren’t already doing that in these courses. Whereas in the four-year college, that was sort of the status quo, and they were able to take that next step to make that course material relevant to them. So in working with their instructors, what we concluded is that you can do this intervention in a different way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be writing. It could be done in small group discussions, it can be done in presentations, it can be done in a lot of different formats that might not present a barrier of writing ability or writing practice. A lot of students in two-year colleges take concurrent writing courses in addition to their science courses. And so removing that barrier of writing, I think, would have been necessary in that context.

Rebecca: It’s a nice helpful reminder, I think, for faculty to be thinking about ways to have reflective practice that doesn’t always involve a lot of reading too. [LAUGHTER] Like, if we’re doing presentations, or if we’re reflecting in a video, or reflecting in conversation. These are all other places that provide some variety, too, so that we’re not always grading the same things or having to intake the same kinds of information. That can also be overwhelming to faculty too. So mixing it up is helpful I think. [LAUGHTER]

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think it also speaks to, you know, one-size-fits-all interventions just are not appropriate. So we publish these papers and we say, “Wait, we found these really amazing findings.” But that’s in one context, maybe with one instructor, maybe at one institution, and every student body is different, every class is different. And so, you really need to figure out the needs of your students and meet them where they are, and also take a step back and look at the purpose of the intervention. Maybe it can be implemented differently. Maybe if you take the philosophy of it and customize it for your context, that’s going to be the more appropriate approach.

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

Elizabeth: Well, right now I’m still working on mindset messages. We just got word that we might potentially be getting a nice grant to look at this. And so what we’re going to be looking at is growth-mindset interventions directed at students crossed with growth mindset messages from faculty. The idea is that when you try to get students to believe in a growth mindset, it’s going to be most effective when the environment is supportive of that message so that it’s supported by the faculty member in that class. So we’re going to be looking at that over the next few years in a bunch of different contexts, in a bunch of different institutions.

Rebecca: Sounds like more beneficial, useful, and exciting information.

John: And again, as Rebecca had said earlier, these are really relatively simple and easy-to-use interventions that I think could be much more widely adopted. Well, thank you.

Elizabeth: Yes, thank you for having me. It was great to talk with you.

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

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

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