Equity-Enhancing Data Tools

[00:00:00] Bonni: Today on episode number 365 of the Teaching In Higher Ed Podcast, I get the great privilege of welcoming back to the show, Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, this time to talk about equity enhancing Data Tools.

[00:00:17] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

[00:00:26] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching In Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. I’m thrilled to be welcoming back to the show today Viji Saphy and Kelly Hogan.

Viji is an award-winning teaching professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaching the very classes she credits for charting her own professional career in quantitative psychology, statistics, and research methods. Sathy is also the program evaluator of the Chancellor’s science scholars. A program aimed at increasing representation of underrepresented students in STEM PhDs. Viji speaks around the country about high structure active learning and quantitative courses and with Dr. Kelly Hogan, who you’ll hear about in just a minute about inclusive teaching. She was born in India but grew up in a small town in North Carolina and is a proud recipient of public education in North Carolina.

Kelly Hogan, since 2004, has been teaching 400-plus seat classes on campus and also online now using interactive teaching methods and technologies. By demonstrating the effectiveness of her methods in large classes, her work has received national attention and publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Kelly works with other faculty to help them re-imagine their teaching. She writes biology textbooks that are used by hundreds of thousands of students and introductory biology and she speaks and writes with Dr. Viji Sathy on inclusive teaching. She and her husband enjoy teaching together in Summer Study Abroad programs because they expose their two children to new countries at the same time.

Before I introduce or I really should say reintroduce today’s guests, I wanted to just take a moment to be thankful for my partnership with the Association of College and University educators or AQ. I have had Kelly and Viji on the show previously but also, they have partnered with AQ and done some work with them. We decided that today’s AQ-focused guests would be building upon the relationships we’ve all established with each other over all of these years.

AQ’s courses and community site feature many of teaching and learnings top experts, faculty, developers, and practitioners to showcase evidence-based teaching practices. For years now, they’ve connected me with guests about once a month to come on Teaching In Higher Ed and they have reconnected me with Viji and Sathy to share on today’s episode. Thanks so much to AQ. Viji and Kelly, welcome back to Teaching In Higher Ed.

[00:03:44] Viji: Hello.

[00:03:45] Kelly: Hi. Good to hear you, again.

[00:03:48] Bonni: I don’t know if either of you has a phone that works this way but mine will pop up everyday memories that either can be memories that are based on geographic things or a year ago this happened to this. You both come up on my phone. Sometimes I get both. It’s a lovely memory but also sad that so much has happened since we last got to connect in person as well as since we last got to connect on the podcast.

I actually want to start by taking us back to the first time we ever got to speak because I know not everybody has been listening for that long. Kelly, I just love any chance I have. You really inspired me and I know inspired so many more people with a story about how your teaching changed based on the kind of data that we’re going to be talking about today, would you tell us about how you saw data emerging into your own sense of ethics around your teaching?

[00:04:43] Kelly: Sure. It was about more than 10 years ago now that a colleague from our Centre for Teaching and Learning got his hands on this spreadsheet and he plopped it down on my desk knowing that I was probably a safe and receptive person to show it to. It had data about how students were doing relative to D and F, and withdrawal rates in our courses, a variety of STEM courses. On that list was Bio 101, which is a course that I had been teaching for years. When I saw the data, my jaw dropped. I just was so disappointed to see data like that.

The data were showing me that there were big disparities based on race and ethnicity. Whereas one in 20 White or Asian students were earning a D or an F, one in four underrepresented minority students were earning a D or an F. I had never seen data like that. I know that most faculty have never seen data like that. Now, this is a big course with hundreds of students. I was being told by colleagues and students, “You’re a good teacher.” I was several years into my teaching and I just couldn’t see that as an outcome of good teaching.

I really questioned, was there something I could do knowing that, I think now I can frame it differently, knowing that there were these systemic barriers? This certainly wasn’t a problem just in my class but nationally but what can I do to level the playing fields for students. That took me into a redesign that, of course, became redesigns and redesigns as you get better and better at things. Through some research with a colleague named Sarah Edie, we were able to show that we had reduced the disparities for minority students and eliminated them for first-gen students compared to non-first-gen students. It was a good outcome.

[00:06:48] Bonni: Oh, thank you so much for retelling that story and still having the same kind of passion that you have about has carried you through a lot. The agenda we’re going to be talking about two different tools and that what you want us to be thinking about today is how we might apply the principles that were used to design these tools in order to use data in our own teaching. Could you tell us a little bit about some of the principles involved in this first tool that you’ll be describing the Faculty Dashboard and then just tell us a little bit about it?

[00:07:18] Viji: Yes, that’s a great question. When we were designing or thinking about this tool, we wanted to have that kind of experience that Kelly described. We wanted to be able to offer that kind of experience to more faculty and to really give people the opportunity to hold a mirror up to their teaching in a way that was pretty inaccessible to a lot of instructors. Normally to be able to access those kind of data, you might need to go through your institutional data office and there could be some hurdles for getting it, and especially getting it in a regular format.

Not a one-off study but to actually be able to check very frequently how maybe even some of the changes you’re making per semester to semester might be impacting your distributions of grades and who is earning what levels of grades in your course. We wanted to think about how do we systematize that process so that faculty can gain access to these data and that it seems easy to understand? That was the other part that was really important to us because you can throw a lot of numbers at people and it can feel overwhelming and not even clear what the takeaways are.

We wanted to spend some time really thinking carefully about the design of this dashboard, the kinds of information that we provided to faculty, even the level of granularity we might offer so that it felt accessible to a wide variety of faculty and also allowed them to do some more narrowing down of their questions. If they really wanted to get into the weeds of looking at not just first-generation college students and differences in grades but women first-generation college students. To really dig down into those individual categories as far as they’d like to go to see differences. We were really thinking through that user side of it as well.

Also because we’re really big advocates for inclusive teaching, we really wanted people to walk away from using this tool to think about what can I do as an instructor to mitigate some of these differences to start learning about inclusive teaching, about universal design for learning, all of those practices that we know are important for good learning? How do we start to get more faculty to espouse those and not blame students for differences we see but actually to take ownership and figure out how to we as instructors start to break down some of those differences that we see?

[00:09:46] Bonni: I have had the opportunity to get just a snapshot of this kind of data that you’re describing. I’ve participated in a teaching certification process through an organization called ESCOLA and one of the things that they have us do is they call it an equity index, I think there’s another word in there that I’m forgetting. If they have something on their website, I’ll link to it with the precise words. It allowed us to see the DFW’s. We were able to get from our institutional research exactly as you described this data. It was a snapshot, it wasn’t a video.

I love for you to share a little bit about what is it like as a professor to be able to see that video over time? What do you find people usually discover when they’re able to analyze this data in more of a longitudinal way, and make those changes in their teaching and be able to see the fruits of those come up. I suspect that it is somewhat limited when you just see it once versus what it’s like to see this kind of data over time.

[00:10:46] Kelly: Yes, compared to the first time I had to ask for institutional data for this study I described to you versus being able to go in on my own now and look at classes, any time slice the data, however, I was working on another project with a different course. I was able to just go in and say I want to see what 2012s look like, I want to see what 2016 looks like. I specifically was looking at Pell-eligible students.

Within five minutes, I had the data, it’s all de-identified, I made a bar graph out of it, I could put that into a teaching dossier. I could use that for a conference, I could start a conversation with my colleagues who also teach that course. It’s just nice to be able to go in anytime you have a question, to look at it. Then it can be longitudinal and you can decide one time I want to slice the data differently. It’s really nice to have it as a dashboard.

[00:11:46] Bonni: You describe your sense of awareness, Kelly, in a really healthy way. There’s no way all of us do that, as well as you describe it. I suspect what little I know about statistics that there and especially someone who would know more than I do, where people want to put other lenses on. By the way, I don’t think that that’s all bad. But we all know, gosh, differences in terms of the times of day in which classes are offered. How do you describe both to experts in statistics, but also to those people coming from disciplines who are not? How do you help them talk through the lenses by which we could apply the sense of equity versus other dynamics that might come into play that would impact students thriving in a class?

[00:12:34] Kelly: Well, Viji is a statistician. I guess you want to take a stab at that one.

[00:12:38] Viji: Yes, that’s a really good observation. Something that we did struggle with in thinking about this application, I’ll give you a really practical case that we were thinking about a course where potentially it’s not hundreds of students, it might be a smaller section, 25 students. Once you start to look at percentages of student groups within a 25% class, the difference of one student or two students can make the percentages seem really big. We have to remind people actually, the end is fairly small so that you’re going to see a lot of balance in those percentages, depending on how you look at it.

We wanted to think through how do we educate people because when you look at particularly some of these dashboards, where the percentages are highlighted, you really need to think through what is this based on. Thinking about things like hovering over, it would allow you to see the number of people that we’re looking at and not just the percentages. That’s an example of some of the ways we wanted to think about the design of the tool to help people understand that, but it does still require some education, about differences.

As you pointed out, we also noticed when we were mining our own data, the spring terms in our courses look a little bit different than the fall terms do. If we were to look at if I taught my statistics class, every semester, I would see kind of this balance of the differences in grades. Then if I isolated just spring terms, and then just fall terms, I’d see something more steady. There are all kinds of things like this, that become more apparent as you dig into the tool, and that you could communicate about the tool. We put a lot of thought into not just the design, but also an orientation to faculty who get into the tool, about the kinds of things that they might expect to see as well as sharing resources for where to go next.

If you start to ask questions that you’re not sure what the answers are, who are the people you can talk to about what you’re saying?

[00:14:34] Bonni: Before we talk about the next tool, I’d love to have you share any ideas for someone coming from a larger institution with the kind of resources potentially to start a project like this and what your advice would be for them to get started. Then those of us from much smaller institutions where we might be, I hate to use this technical term, but we might be hacking together some things more independently to try to analyze this part of our teaching, what would be your advice big, and your advice small?

[00:15:06] Kelly: Big advice, this tool can be difficult to set up, you need to think about who needs to be in the room to start developing this tool. We had to ask ourselves questions like should faculty, should the instructors be able to see current semesters or only past semesters? Where will the data streams pull from, what institutional offices need to be involved to pull data from those? Are there some data that are off-limits to the people at your institution? What to do with small classes? These are all decision points that have to come to some resolution before you can even build the tool. Viji, did you want to add to that?

[00:15:48] Viji: No, I think one practical aspect to consider is if you have fairly small sections of a class, where digging into this, even smaller subsets of groups in their potential trends, thinking about accumulating a certain number of course instances where you may begin to start to piece a picture together, I think saying it’s not possible because our classes are too small, is not ideal. I think we should still keep looking. Obviously, the conclusions you draw on these smaller samples are a lot more tenuous. As much as you can accumulate data, I think that would be a better way to go about doing it.

[00:16:30] Bonni: In a past episode, when you were on you spoke about course evaluations. One of the recommendations you had to us then was, it’s probably obvious, but don’t only look at course evaluations, certainly that as instrument it has its flaws. In my limited experience with this, I have found similar things work because my sample sizes are always so small. I haven’t identified a problem. By the way, that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem there, but so then I can incorporate other kinds of tools.

That same certification I was mentioning earlier with the organization called a scholar, which I’ll link to in the show notes. They had another instrument where you could record yourself teaching. Then it’s almost like doing a transcript. It’s like doing peer evaluation, but of your own class and getting your own feedback. When the students talked, dividing male versus female, also looking at historically marginalized populations, that kind of thing. That was yet another lens. Oh, did I invite participation and engagement and involvement from more than just the dominant voices, et cetera? Layering some of these tools on top of each other to kind of get that more fuller picture, I’ve also found to be helpful when we’re limited by the kinds of data analysis we’re able to do.

[00:17:51] Kelly: Yes, that’s a great example. We can do that for each other too. We can go into each other’s classes and pay attention to some of these equity ideas when we’re observing peers. Getting back to your question around what instructors can do, to work with data, to be data-driven, to think about all students thriving, I think we all collect a lot of data in our teaching that we don’t always see as data. For example, I have an E-text homework system that I expect students to be using right away when the class starts.

What I’ll do is, I’ll go look after the end of week two, and see who hasn’t even opened the system. That’s data right there. Those are students that I’m worried about from the beginning, I don’t want them to get behind. I’ll reach out and find out, do you not have access? Is there a financial issue? It could be a myriad of reasons, maybe the students even going to drop the course. It’s just nice to reach out and say, is everything okay? I do the same between exam one and exam two, I look at who had a big leap, either upwards or downwards. If someone went down, I’ll reach out to them and just carefully say, like, I’m here, is there anything that you want to talk about? I see things went in a direction that I didn’t like to see as a teacher, so let me know if there’s anything I can do.

Students always really appreciate, especially with the number of students that I have, that I’m paying attention and it’s because I just put things in a spreadsheet and I look at those differences. I’m sure within each discipline, people have data like this, that they can be thinking about.

[00:19:35] Bonni: Viji, anything to add as far as collecting data that might be valuable to us on how we might respond to that? Then we’ll go into that second tool.

[00:19:44] Viji: Yes, I agree. I think there are a ton of data sources to look at. I’ll give you an example on my own course. One thing that I struggled with was figuring out who wasn’t in the room when we were meeting in person. When you have a small class, it might be easily easy to surmise the one or two students who didn’t make it to class, but once you start to get, even beyond 10 sometimes, it gets really hard to put the names down of the people who aren’t there. Then of course, in a room of 200 or 300, even more difficult to figure out who are the 10 students who didn’t make it to class today.

Keeping track of these things– That was one thing that I worked with our campus to develop a tool. We call it a check-in tool, but students can pull out their phone and then I open a session where they just say, “I’m here,” and they check in to class, and then on my end, I can sort and see immediately the seven students who didn’t check-in. Then, I have a way to now reach out to them and say, “I noticed you weren’t in class today, is everything okay? I just wanted to check in with you,” because that’s such an important part of this, we drafted some language that’s basically that kind of language of, “I’m checking in on you. Is everything okay?” Built into the tool, so you can click the names of those people and send off this message.

It’s really this bigger message that we want to start espousing and sharing with our students, that we care about them, that we’re making note of these things, and we’re reaching out to them. We don’t want it to be punitive in any way. We really want it to be that we were noticing and this is where I think data can be really powerful.

[00:21:20] Bonni: Well, let’s look at this next tool. The one that you just described, which, by the way, there’ll be lots of links in the show notes for people to go follow up and read more about it. The first one is the more faculty class-oriented data. The second one is one that looks more at students, a student-facing tool, and I know it came up as a result of some of the things that your students were experiencing around the pandemic. Viji, what can you tell us about what you started to notice as the pandemic began and these students’ needs emerged?

[00:21:56] Viji: Yes, Kelly and I are part of a group of people who are meeting very regularly during this time, thinking about academic planning in every term. One of the things that we were hearing was that students were feeling frustrated about not knowing enough about a course, as they were constructing their schedule. For example, a really concrete example is, how much of the class is synchronous versus asynchronous. We might be saying it’s a mix of asynchronous and synchronous, but you could imagine there’s a whole spectrum of the percentage, of course, that’s synchronous, and so, how much time do I need to be in my seat in front of Zoom versus on my own learning, or watching videos or something like that.

In addition to a lot of other things that are really important when thinking about constructing a course schedule like, how much group work is there? What percentage of the grade is based on exams? Are they open-book exams? All kinds of things that, as we were all thinking about shifting our teaching during the pandemic to online approaches, we were rethinking our approaches to how we deliver our content, how we assess our content with our students. We weren’t always very clear, and with good reason, sometimes we just had to switch midstream, but we weren’t always clear with students about what we wanted and what we expected.

In this planning group, we’re thinking about, can we start to really give students more information at the time of registration about the course? It’s something that we’ve dreamed about doing for a long time, but became really practical and needed during the pandemic, and it’s been so warmly received that we’ll definitely be able to maintain it even after the pandemic.

[00:23:42] Kelly: Yes, for years students call the first day of class syllabus day, and I hear this as a phrase that probably happens nationally. It’s just a shame that students need to register for a class, go to the first class, and then find out all the formats and all the things that are going to happen. This tool is just a dream come true for us. To think about how students can do this every semester and yes, as Viji said, the pandemic shone a light on what needed to be done, but we had the right people in the room to be able to build a tool that we’ve always wanted to be present.

[00:24:20] Bonni: For this class features tool, could you address the same questions that you addressed with the first tool in that, what would this look like if I was a larger institution that might have some IT, or other types of resources to really go big on this? Also, what if I needed to go a little bit smaller on it? Either at a smaller level between colleagues, or maybe even, is there a smaller level just for an individual faculty that wants to be more transparent about this kind of thing?

[00:24:49] Viji: Well, I can address the larger aspect in thinking about the platforms that exist for your registration. We found that it’s ideal to build within that system. You don’t want to necessarily have students going to different places to get this and piece it together. If you have the ability to build it in within registration so it’s a link, and oftentimes, there is some kind of a course description that accompanies a registration for a student. Is there a way that there could be a link that links out to additional documents? Or, as we’ve designed it, a standard kind of form that answers some questions that students consider to be pretty vital to them in terms of constructing a course schedule.

The ideal scenario is that it’s built within your registration system and that you have lots of conversations with both students and faculty, and advisors about what is helpful to get students to navigate to the right courses. As Kelly mentioned, it’s extremely inefficient to have students register, take up a seat in a course, go to the first day and realize, “Oh wait, this class isn’t what I thought it was going to be. I need to drop it and scramble to find another class.” We don’t want all that movement. If we can avoid that, that would be great.

Now, we’re giving people, at the time of registration, the opportunity to look at the fit of that class in their schedule.

Also, it’s a nice benefit. Instructors get to push out information about their courses through this platform. I can share my FAQs. I have this website of Frequently Asked Questions about my course. I can just put that on this tool so that students can get there immediately, and see the common questions that I tend to get before a semester. Hopefully, that cuts down even on some of the correspondence that we get in those in-between terms about, how much does the book cost? Do I need this particular edition of the book? That can all be addressed within this tool.

[00:26:43] Bonni: I’m both exhilarated by what you’re sharing, and also horrified although not by you. I’m trying to envision, even at our itty-bitty institution. I cannot imagine a world in which we have 100% adoption on something like that. Especially, because it’s just a realistic view for us. Sometimes, it’s for really great reasons where you need extra sections, so you’re able to take advantage of bringing on more adjunct faculty, but when things like that happen at the last minute it’s harder to do. Then, as I’m thinking those things, there’s no way you have 100% adoption so, what does it look like when the adoption isn’t there? How can it still be valuable even when there are those gaps? How do you handle that kind of thing?

[00:27:26] Kelly: It’s a new tool for us, so we definitely do not have 100% adoption. When you think about what students have when they go to register, it’s nothing. It’s, “Write my professor,” or what peers have told them, and it’s not coming from the best resource, which is the instructor. Some adoption is better than no adoption. That’s how I feel, for sure, but we are definitely working to make it as easy as possible. For example, we have some preset questions that instructors can check off in there, and that should only take a few minutes.

Sometimes, there are questions you’re not quite ready to answer, so we also have a place you can just upload your syllabus from last semester, and just say, “This is how I taught it last time. There may be a few changes but most of it looks the same,” and that shouldn’t be a huge lift for a lot of faculty. We’re trying to think of what are the barriers, and we’ll get better as we use the tool and hear from faculty about why they aren’t using it.

[00:28:27] Bonni: What is your advice then for those of us that won’t have a whole system, but ways that we could just more individually be a bit more transparent around some of these things? You mentioned the Frequently Asked Questions on your website, but other ideas for those of us that want to start small on something like this, start at the individual level.

[00:28:46] Kelly: I don’t know about your institution and others, but we know who’s registered in our classes for weeks before we start the semester, and there’s an easy way within our registration system to simply just email all the students. Often, they’re in our learning management system within a few weeks of the semester starting, as well. I do think it’s about recognizing and being empathetic to students not having this information, and setting your own deadlines a little bit earlier, or sending them anything you can. Once again, anything is better than nothing. We can each take a little bit more personal responsibility to get something in, even if it’s not through our system.

[00:29:26] Bonni: I also would love to hear you comment a little bit– This is so energizing to me. It shouldn’t surprise me, but it’s lovely to hear you talking about such a similar challenge that I find we’re having at my institution, just as far as wanting because we are doing more HyFlex learning now and students are absolutely loving it. That, of course, then increases the need to be very clear about what it is that’s different because that kind of thing– We will still of course have people where the students will think, “Gosh, I just want lecture. I didn’t want to pay for college and then get taught by my peers.”

Some of that is, becoming more culture-responsive and our teaching takes some time. We constantly have to be transparent about why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? Not think that because you said at once, and some people are better at that than others. I still think if it’s going to be a more lecture-oriented class, let’s get that up front. If it’s going to be more active learning, that would be really helpful and you talked about group projects.

The other thing I’m wondering is, have you run into barriers where one person’s, you mentioned group projects, is entirely different than another person’s, or sometimes students will call things busy work. Some of these asynchronous things. Then in other classes, they go, “Oh, my gosh, I had fun while I was learning, and I can’t believe how much I learned.” The same type of activities are experienced, of course, very differently, because some people can be more skilled, more adept at actually doing them.

Have you run into that kind of thing and any advice for people who might be looking at this on an institutional level to remedy some of that? What have you run into when it comes to disparities in terms of how things are described?

[00:31:16] Viji: I can’t say that we’ve had people talk to us about that specific issue, because the way the form is structured, or at least the standard part of the form, it’s more factual information, like what percentage of the final exam comprises your grade. That’s less up for debate than how much or what percentage of the class is lecture. I’m not sure where even the greatest judges of what percentage of our individual class sessions are lecture.

I think we want to move away from things that are squishier in nature, even as an individual to be able to judge and move more towards the concrete things that I know that we should be able to say right like we do study. We do have group work. I do have a flexible attendance policy. I will post lectures or I won’t post a lecture video. Those sort of things that we know will be implemented differently across different sections of a class, but students may want to have that information on hand before they take the course.

[00:32:14] Kelly: Bonni, I think it’s about the first impression you make with students. What you put there and the idea that we’re allowing a syllabus to be uploaded means that I can use all my good language to reach students about why I’m doing what I’m doing and be the person that gives them that rationale and reasoning and welcoming all at once and get them excited about what they’re going to do rather than walking in with this impression of some past experience. That’s the hope I would have that I get to put all of that language in excites them.

[00:32:49] Bonni: Viji you were talking about even earlier, the ability that I can’t imagine any of us would not have is just to be able to email those students. It’s a month before class or two months and here’s the textbook and a little bit of information. Maybe even here’s a link to a course trailer, if you’re interested in learning a little bit more about what this class might be like for you. I welcome you contacting me before I start. Whatever is going to be that welcoming, inclusive language and tone that any of us might want to provide us really great advice.

Is there anything else you want to talk to us about in terms of what you’ve learned from both of these projects before we go to the recommendations segment?

[00:33:28] Viji: I’d say one thing that we’ve learned as we build and continue to build tools that are really thinking about undergraduate education and inclusion is just because you build it, it doesn’t mean they’ll come. I think that that’s been something that we struggle with figuring out how do we get adoption to be higher? How do we incorporate so for example, the my course analytics dashboard, where people can look at disparities in their grades. How do we start to think about, are there ways that people could be using this in evaluating promotion tenure?

Are there ways in which we could start to bring this into some of our more routine evaluations so that it is adopted on a more widespread basis, and that we have more users looking at these data regularly and that they’re informing our decisions about courses that we offer, potentially how we improve those courses that maybe are bottlenecks for students really thinking through all of the processes that help us deliver caring instruction to students?

I’d love to see us have a broader conversation as a community and education community about more tools that do this work about connecting our work with others and expanding the reach and also adoption, thinking through how do we get more incentivize participation and these sorts of things.

[00:34:55] Kelly: Just to link it back to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives around campus, it’s not enough to have a diverse student body. Sure, you can look at a dashboard and say, “Okay, there’s a lot of diversity there, or there’s not,” but we really need to go beyond that think about how do all students feel included, how do we know students are thriving, what’s the evidence that they’re thriving and how do we support that?

[00:35:19] Bonni: Before we get to the recommendations segment, for today’s episode, I just want to share my thanks with today’s sponsor, and that is TextExpander. What I love about that, today is the episode where I get to share about TextExpander is that there’s such a relevant example that I can use here. TextExpander is a text expansion tool. You set up what they call snippets, you type in a few characters, and before you know it out expands something that’s either hard for you to remember.

For me, it’s my work phone number, getting even harder and harder by the way, or it could be even something as extensive as a letter of recommendation where you just input fillable fields. Before you know it, that thing is written for you. During the episode, we talked a little bit about giving feedback to students who are struggling and might need your help. You can use TextExpander, to either just drop in what you’d like that text to be or you also can personalize that where you could add in and leave essentially placeholders for you to add in customized information.

Not only is TextExpander, the sponsor for today’s episode, it’s a wonderful tool, something I install first thing on all of my new computers when I get them or new devices. It also happens to fit with many of the techniques that were talked about in today’s episode. Thank you so much to TextExpander, for sponsoring today’s episode of Teaching In Higher Ed, and for your support.

This is the time in the show where we now get to share our recommendations. I came across a web page, a set of tools, from Harvard Graduate School of Education, called Instructional Moves. I really liked that terminology, just this idea of it instantly brought to mind things that are moving things that are active, things that can really engage. At the top of the page that says, “Great teaching can be learned. The goal of the instructional moves project is to help you incorporate and refine high-leverage teaching practices tailored to the higher education context.”

You can go all throughout the website and find ideas for how to build community, how to lecture interactively, how to facilitate discussions, and how to teach through problems. Once you find one of those areas that you want to explore more, for example, the facilitating discussions, you go there and they’ve got even more choices. Do you want to frame a discussion? Do you want to balance and paste things? Do you want to respond to students and you can go click through and explore even deeper?

Then they have specific practices that they explore. I’m looking at now, how can I use my voice more intentionally to both challenge and encourage students’ thinking? One of the examples here is asking questions that probe for deeper understandings. I’m now at the most granular, the most specific level here and I see an instructor, Todd Rakoff, who’s a professor of administrative law, and it’s an example from what kind of a group size was he working with, in this case, 80 students, and what additional details might be about this specific example of how discussion can play out.

Then there’s a video of him talking about it. There are classroom considerations. There is relevant research so you can know where are the studies within the scholarship of teaching and learning that would support this practice being demonstrated by him in this particular context, and then other related resources that you could go and explore. As you might imagine, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know I geeked out on this website for quite some time, and feel like I was just getting started.

I’m going to have it in the show notes. I really encourage you to go have a look and think about just one approach that you could really think about incorporated into your next term or your next semester’s classes and give it a try and even bonus points go to those who share with us how that experimentation went with you. Viji, I’m going to pass it over to you for your recommendations.

[00:39:28] Viji: Well, this might not surprise you, Bonni, but I am going to recommend since we’ve been talking about data and tools, I’m going to recommend tools for getting people’s names pronounced correctly. This is something that is near and dear to my heart as somebody whose name gets butchered often. We know that getting names right is important for belonging for feeling like you’re part of a community. I think we can leverage technology.

In Zoom, it’s really great because you can just edit your name to include a phonetic spelling and I’ve had the ability to include an audio recording of my name and my email signature and on my website. So people can click it and hear me pronounce my name. Now there’s a variety of tools that do that. NameCoach is one, NameDrop. Even your own learning management system may have an ability for students, for example, to upload an audio file of their name. I use a pretty crude system of just recording it on my phone and posting it on my Google drive and then linking to that. It’s a really easy thing to do, and it’s not just about being courteous to people and getting their name right. It’s actually an act of allyship. It’s an act of anti-racism to get names, correct, and to correct people when our colleagues’ names are mispronounced to jump in.

Kelly has been great about doing this. Noticing when people are struggling or maybe even pulling people aside when she’s known that they’ve had trouble getting the name right to say, “It’s actually pronounced this.” Then moving people along, because it’s tough to be that person to always correct people about their names. At some point you throw your hands up and say, I can’t do it anymore. It’s nice to have allies who can do that for you. Sometimes the power dynamics are such that it’s awkward to do it.

I think anytime you hear someone’s name being mispronounced, having the ability to step in and offer it, but also just leveraging technology and making it accustomed in the same way that we might provide our pronouns to people, to be able to say, let’s just provide our name pronunciations to people so we can get that right.

Bonni: All right, Kelly, what do you have to recommend for us today?

Kelly: I am going to recommend a podcast and I don’t know about you, but the pandemic had me doing a lot of walking just to get outside and do something other than beyond my Zoom screen. One of the podcasts that I listened to was Nice White Parents and it just stuck with me. I think it’s worth recommending. If you don’t know about it, it’s about how the class and race of parents can affect inequities in this one particular school that they explore really deeply.

There are some well-intentioned white parents that over and over historically, they’re the ones being heard and their opinions are having these huge consequences for the majority of students. It’s often not in the interest of the majority of the students. As a white parent and a white educator, it gave me a lot to think about. Without doing any more summary that I would do injustice to that summary I’ll just say, I think it will stick with you and give you a good sense of where some of our students are coming from and how we can be well-intentioned and still not meet these goals of equity.

Bonni: Well, thanks to both of you for being back on Teaching In Higher Ed. I always love any opportunity. I get to have a conversation with you. I’m looking forward to– you already told me that you’ll come back when your book comes out. I hope you’ll come back even before then. Any opportunity that we get to talk, I’m always left just feeling so inspired and, and it goes beyond inspiration though into how do we take our intentions and actually do something with them, turn them into reality. You’re just so great about making those things practical so that our values line up with our practices. Thank you for everything you do. Thank you for all the times you’ve been on the show. Thank you in advance for all the times you’re coming back.

[laughter]

I’m really looking forward to our next conversation.

Viji: Thank you.

Kelly: Thank you, Bonni.

[music]

Bonni: Thanks once again, to Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan for joining me on today’s episode of Teaching In Higher Ed. If you liked to see the show notes for Teaching In Higher Ed episode 365 you can head over to teachinginhighered.com/365. Or they’re probably already in your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to receive those show notes on a weekly basis, you can go over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. That way the notes will get emailed to you along with some other interesting things, such as other recommendations that don’t come up on the episodes, some related episodes, and quotable words. Head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

Thanks once again for listening to Teaching In Higher Ed. I’ll see you next time.

[00:44:28] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

 Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.