Take-aways from the Lilly Conference, with Todd Zakrajsek

Bonni [00:00:00] Today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed number 90, takeaways from the Lilly Conference.

Production Credit [00:00:08] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni [00:00:17] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni [00:00:46] I just got back from the Lilly Conference. Well I shouldn’t say got back, it sounds like I actually had to travel long distances. It was a Newport Beach, California which is about 30 minutes from where we live.

Bonni [00:00:57] I’m excited to be welcoming back to the show Todd Zakrajsek, who is the person who plans and makes all of the magic happen. He’s the former Executive Director of the Academy of Educators in the School of Medicine and is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Family Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill and he is the immediate past Executive Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Bonni [00:01:26] And he’s such an engaging presenter. He was one of the keynotes presenters and as I said is also the key planner of the California Lilly conference. And I’m just so excited to be getting one more opportunity to learn from him and share some of the learning that I took away from the conference as well. Todd, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Todd [00:01:45] Well thank you Bonni, it’s great to be back at the show.

Bonni [00:01:47] I appreciate you so quickly and packing your suitcase- although maybe you just leave your suitcase packed all of the time in your life but unpacking that suitcase and willing to come in and share a little bit about the Lilly Conference.

Bonni [00:01:58] And one thing I know we both want to stress upfront, this is not an advertisement for the Lilly Conference. And there’s a couple of reasons why. One would be that the Lilly Conference is now over so you can’t travel back in time and attend it, although you could probably start thinking about next year if you want to think about spring of 2017 in gorgeous California.

Bonni [00:02:18] But also, we really want to just have it be for other people couldn’t be there and want to hear what are key takeaways were or people who were there and want to reflect more, I know that was a big thing for me was reflecting on what I learned. So it’s not an advertisement, you have paid no money to be here. I’ve paid you no money to be here. But you did give me a free book which was wonderful.

Todd [00:02:38] I did and I saved you like probably fifteen dollars off Amazon there. So that’s good news. The other thing I think it’s worth saying Bonni, is that the reason to have this conversation is just like anybody who comes back from one of these conferences, any teaching conference out there, a teaching conference is so different from a disciplinary conference.

Todd [00:02:54] And people just get just jazzed on the fact that you got people from different disciplines facing common issues but they approach the solutions from their home disciplines. So you see a wide variety of ways of addressing these common issues. So yeah I think it’s a great opportunity just to talk about teaching and learning in general.

Bonni [00:03:12] In the session that I gave I read a quote from Parker Palmer and I’m just going to read it really quick because it reminds me of I’m not exaggerating when I say this every single person that I met is reflected in this quote. “I am a teacher at heart and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy when my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illumined by the lightning life of the mind. Then teaching is the finest work I know.”

Todd [00:03:47] That’s a great quote. I love that quote.

Bonni [00:03:49] That was everyone at the conference. Every single person that I met has a passion for teaching and as you said from so many different disciplines. I’ll tell you one thing, one of my treasured memories is sitting at lunch in the gorgeous California sun.

Bonni [00:04:02] I promise it’s not an advertisement, but it really was pretty during the conference. And there were a couple of guys from I believe it was the University of Houston and they both teach in political science, one incredibly conservative, one incredibly progressive in their politics and just watching them have such healthy discourse and I mean it is just lovely to see when every time we turn on the news we see the opposite of that.

Bonni [00:04:24] So it’s really delightful. And as you said all different disciplines I met people from that. And one of the things I was going to mention there is a woman from Egypt who I know from Twitter, Maha Bali and I’ll put a link to her Twitter handle inside of the show notes. But she does something called virtual connecting and she does it with someone else although right now I don’t have the woman’s name right in front of me. But for when they can’t go to conferences, or for when they’re at a conference and they want to help welcome someone else in, they have these virtual connections that happen. And sometimes the virtual connection happens inside of a session. But a lot of times it happens outside the session in the hallway conversations that we are so typically having at these kinds of conferences, they’re often connecting with someone on a Google hangout or over Skype and introducing them to people there and the learning that’s going on at the conference. So that’s kind of what you and I are going to try to do on this podcast, just a few takeaways from the conference that each of us has.

Todd [00:05:21] That sounds great.

Bonni [00:05:22] And one of the people that I heard him speak for the first time was Terry Doyle and I know you know him quite well and have coauthored a book with him as well. But he talked about just how difficult teaching is. And I love that. Yeah.

Todd [00:05:35] I think one of the problems we have in our society is it feels like everybody teaches and everybody learns. If I ask you the direction to the airport and you explain them to me well, you’ve taught me get to the airport. And if I’m walking by a window and I watch somebody do something for a few seconds, then I’ve just learned that. It makes it feel like the process of teaching in the process of learning is very natural.

Todd [00:05:56] The challenge becomes when you put 20, 30, or 40 people in a room and you have 3 months to bring about the best change in them that you possibly can. And that means coming up with a variety of activities and different ways of doing things and it’s an incredibly complex process. And I don’t want to scare anybody. But I’d also like to bring recognition to the fabulous fabulous work that people do when they do connect with students and have a great classroom experience. It’s a lot of work.

Bonni [00:06:21] He framed his conversation around three questions that we should ask ourselves. The first one being what content should we teach? Which that in and of itself, I just stop right there and go- I’m teaching a class for the first time and I’ve talked about it a few times on the podcast so it’s not the deep dark secret that it so often does when we do things that we are not as familiar with. And just that idea I already know I am guilty as charged that I’m trying to teach too much. And one of the questions that someone posed that five years after somebody takes our class, what would we’d like them to say about it?

Todd [00:07:00] Yep that was Terry using Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University in a slightly different way. Five years after your students graduate, what would you really want him or her to actually remember.

Bonni [00:07:13] I did not have that Five Minute University in the show notes until you said that and I just added it back in. That was a hysterical clip. I’m not familiar with that at all, that was the first time I ever saw it.

Todd [00:07:22] Yup it’s an old 1970s clip.

Bonni [00:07:25] Oh. Priceless. We will link to it if it’s available somewhere on the internet. On those interweb, we will find it and post it up there. Yeah just that idea of what we want want them to say in five years.

Bonni [00:07:35] And then the other a cut to questions he posed one would be what can students do on their own? And one really small thing that I did and my business ethics class that worked out super well, and this is so basic, but just I hadn’t tried it before was we were talking about ethics related to product liability. And so I had them go look on the Consumer Protection website and go look on the FDA website and just come to class prepared to share one interesting thing that you found on each site. And they came- it ended up being the craziest conversation because when you give students an opportunity to explore, you absolutely never know where their journey will take them.

Bonni [00:08:17] So we talked about hover boards and we talked about one of the students her mom owns a collections agency so she was sharing about one of the suits related to them cracking down on collections agencies that was particularly personal to her and just saying gosh we can look at this with a number of different lenses. It was just the most fascinating conversation because the students had a chance to go and explore on their own.

Bonni [00:08:42] And then the last question they asked and I’ll stop talking and let you give some examples. He says what is the best use of our time? And for me, the best use of our time was to tell me what you found when you explored?

Todd [00:08:54] Yeah I think one of the things we forget is that the students are capable of learning. And that sounds like a terrible statement to make as a faculty member. But when you walk into the classroom where the concept of “today I need to cover Chapter 6” and what I’m going to do then is outline it and make sure that I talk about every part of chapter 6 and explain it, we’re not really leaving that room for students to explore and to learn we’re telling them. And teaching should be more than telling. So part of what we do is we find opportunities to push students and have them do things. And Vygotsky brought this up years ago with the zones of proximal development is where as a student able to perform? And what we really want to do is catch a student or they’re capable but slightly uncomfortable. And we’re that bridge, we’re that assistance that can help move them along into an area that they’re a little bit uncomfortable with but still within their grasp. And that’s the area we want to hit. And I think that’s what Terry was getting at with his presentation.

Bonni [00:09:49] Another of many superb speakers that you had there was Stephen Brookfield. And for people who haven’t maybe been listening to the show since the very beginning and I know many of you he was actually back on the show on Episode 15 so I’ll put a link to that in the show notes that teachinginhighered.com/90. And what a wonderful conversation he brought then and also brought today. All this time later at the conference. One of the big takeaways I took from him this time, and it’s something I already know but I can’t hear enough, is just the constant need for us to be sharing with the students “the reason why we are doing this is.” And one of the things he’s really always stressed is is back to what you just said about the zone of proximal development is that yeah you’re stretching me, you’re making me uncomfortable and I don’t like this. And in our case those of us that are using some of these teaching techniques, we’re breaking very ingrained norms and that is uncomfortable for people.

Bonni [00:10:49] I still remember being in college and being asked to write a paper for introduction to sociology that involved breaking various norms and my entire papers were always about how I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. And so that’s what we’re asking our students to do. So if we remember all the way along as we’re making them uncomfortable, and perhaps unhappy, if we consistently explain the reason why we’re doing this- and Stephen didn’t say this but for me I have found just even in the last couple of years that it’s not just an instructive intent that I have I’m going to teach you how I’m attempting to teach you but it’s also just to remind them of where my heart is. I’m doing this because I care. I do this a lot with- just I think about how I used to say “put your cell phone away. Put your laptop away.” It used to be a very command and control relative to what it is today. And today every time it’s just like “you know what, we’re actually not going mean that laptop today. It is not going to serve us very well. We’ll bring it back out next week.” It just is a kinder approach and one that I think shows them a little bit more of my deep care for them.

Todd [00:11:56] Well I think Stephen brought up- there’s a quote from one of his books or articles there are so many years ago and it was there are very few opportunities for us as faculty members to actually experience or to feel what it is to be a student and conferences are one of those opportunities.

Todd [00:12:12] So we started out and were talking about this conference a bit but whenever you go to a conference to be able to sit back and think OK now I’m a student, what really works for me? What doesn’t work for me? And thinking through the process of it is also very very helpful. But what you’ve been mentioning too is explaining to people why you want them to do something is a huge concept.

Todd [00:12:32] I’m an industrial psychologist so in industry and in business is if a worker knows why they’re doing something, they’re much better at doing it than if it’s a mystery to them. Why they need to do a certain procedure or why they have to follow a certain policy. You explain. If we don’t follow this policy then the accountant can’t do this part and there’s no billing and so we make no money so we need this piece. So the same type of thing in teaching. We just explain why we’re using a certain procedure, a certain approach and explain to the students the value behind it. It really helps them to understand why they’re doing it.

Bonni [00:13:06] Speaking of industrial psychology, it also reminds me of another related thing and that is back to the learnings from the Hawthorne studies. And for anyone listening not familiar with the Hawthorne studies, this was in an electrical manufacturing plant and they would go to their workers and they’re genuinely trying to say how do we create the most production out of this manufacturing line? Does it work better when we put the lights down? And they would go and ask them “how does this work for you? Do you like this? Does it work for you?” And they they put the lights back up. The lesson learned was that it had very little to do with the lighting conditions and very much to do with being asked about it.

Todd [00:13:45] Well kind of, Bonni. What they found was they didn’t have their control group and they were changing the lighting settings, if I recall correctly, I haven’t looked at this study in 20 years. But they were making all these adjustments and they wondered if we increased the lighting, would people produce more? And they increased the lighting and they produced more. And then they tried things like changing the environment and they did all these different things but then they found well we better double check and so then they lowered the lighting and productivity went up more. And everything they did changed the productivity and what they determined in the end was just paying attention to people increased the productivity to go up.

Todd [00:14:18] So the Hawthorne effect is essentially as soon as you start studying something, you start to see some results. Which I will tie in very quickly you have to be extremely careful in teaching and learning because people will try things in teaching and learning and see better responses from their students which is the equivalent of the Hawthorne effect. Because if I for instance walk into the classroom and say “hey everybody, let’s just stand up and stretch really fast.” Everybody stands up and stretch a little bit. Now sit down and let’s get to learning. You may see the learning increase. At that moment, you don’t know if the learning increased because you stood up and stretched which a lot of people feel that probably it is that or it’s just because you did something different. So we always have to be careful and do something for a period of time to make sure it wasn’t, well, the Hawthorne effect.

Bonni [00:15:04] And that reminds me of something that was so powerful that you sat in your presentation about avoiding the either or thinking because it could have been both the stretching really worked and also mixing it up completely worked. Would you share a little bit on some of your thoughts just about the dangers of either or thinking, particularly as it relates to our own teaching approaches that we use?

Todd [00:15:25] Oh certainly. So I do get concerned at times that we like to put individuals into boxes. We do this all the time even though we claim we don’t like to do it. As soon as we start saying things like “well that the students and introvert in class. How do I get my introverts to talk?” Or “I have a student who’s a real extrovert who talks a lot.”

Todd [00:15:43] So as soon as we start thinking introvert and extrovert then we’re putting people at two opposite ends of a spectrum. The Myers Briggs doesn’t actually intend to do that. Most people are not introverts or extroverts. There’s some space in between the two.

Todd [00:15:57] So that concept of are you an introvert versus an extrovert? Should we use lecturing versus active learning? The research doesn’t indicate that you should do one or the other says we should include engaged active learning with lecturing. And the point going through here is any time we start looking at these concepts and saying should we do this or that? Do the students fall into this category or the other category? We lose the richness of all of the individuals in between. It can be as basic as talking about students turning papers in on time. Do your students tend to turn your papers and on time or not turn them in on time? We love these dichotomies all the time. So I think the danger there is if we’re always thinking of them as a dichotomy. And so instead I think we have to look at that richness that happens there because we are always operating in systems.

Bonni [00:16:44] You talked about a couple of myths that really come up every time we look at teaching and learning, I shouldn’t say every time but are frequently there. And one of them has to do with a learning period and I’ll tell you I have been seeing this thing for more than 20 years.

Bonni [00:17:01] It’s been around a long time. And for people who may not be familiar with it or need a little jog of their memory, it’s a pyramid that at the very top is if I just see something. Is that right Todd? And then if I see it and write it down and then if I see it and write it down and it just moves all the way down and I forgot what’s at the bottom of the pyramid.

Todd [00:17:20] Yeah basically it’s the old concept of I remember five percent of what- I don’t know if I can remember all of these- but it’s something like 5 percent of what I hear in 10 percent of what I see. If it’s an audio visual thing it’s like a 20 percent. If I have a discussion it’s a 50 percent. If you practice it it’s like 75 and if I teach somebody it’s 90. So it’s this pyramid that starts out at the very top of if you only hear something, you remember very little but all the way down to the bottom if you’re teaching others you remember a great deal more.

Todd [00:17:50] And the issue is that came from an old study by name person named Kohn. But the concept here is this pyramid emerged and the numbers look way too clean. It’s like 5 percent, 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent. And I taught research methods for so many years. I always told my students if you ever see really clean clean numbers definitely check it out because data almost never comes out that clean.

Todd [00:18:14] And so apparently, this is according to the websites that are out there, is that some individuals started digging into a little bit and it appears that all of those numbers are fabricated. And so the concepts are still good. The more you do something the more likely you are to remember, that’s nice. But this actual pyramid that’s put out that has those percentages on it essentially are just concocted numbers. And you can find that out by essentially searching very easily under learning pyramid and myth. And it will just pop right up the whole discussion of it.

Bonni [00:18:45] And speaking of things that we can type into Google, what’s going to happen if I type in learning styles myth?

Todd [00:18:52] Oh well that’s a tricky one too and I’m not sure if I really call this a myth. A lot of people around the country are now talking about this. In fact I was so encouraged just recently picked up I work at UNC-Chapel Hill and I picked up the student newspaper and one of the students said just this quick off comment  toward the end mentioned something along the lines of “Well I guess I could just pretend like learning styles mean something.”

Todd [00:19:15] So it was interesting. It’s really becoming pervasive. And the idea is it’s called meshing, it’s teaching to a given learning style. And an article came out a few years ago by Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork, I believe it was 2007 I’m pretty sure and they went through and looked at all the literature and I guess I should say failed to demonstrate that there was any actual impact of teaching to a given learning style.

Todd [00:19:41] There’s some question as to whether or not people actually even have learning styles. So that’s a debatable point right now, although we certainly have different ways of learning. So there are learning and there are certain learning preferences. Now learning preferences are something that you would develop through years. For instance, if I work with my hands a lot I would prefer to learn by working with my hands. A style oftentimes is referred to as a way of doing it. Which means I might feel like the only way I can learn is by working with my hands which would mean I am a kinesthetic learner and it’s my only way of learning. A preference is hey if I’m given a choice I’d prefer to do this. The big dilemma here is if a person sees herself or himself as a visual learner and there are not many visuals, then that individual might say “well I can’t possibly learn because I’m a visual learner and there’s no visuals.”

Todd [00:20:28] So the issue we have here is whether that’s true or not. And there’s no evidence that that’s true. A person who claims to be a visual learner could listen to a podcast and learn a lot.

Bonni [00:20:37] One of the tools that you brought up that hasn’t actually been mentioned on any episode previously is from Dee Fink. Can you share a little bit about his Taxonomy of Significant Learning?

Todd [00:20:49] Oh yes. Well Dee Fink. He’s a neat guy. He’s really really concerned with the concept of providing these really good learning environments for students. In 2003, he wrote a book Creating Significant Learning Experiences. And then it was revised in 2013. One of the things that he really takes to heart in here is looking through what it is we really have to take into consideration when we teach and when we’re learning and specific content has always been there. When I first started teaching, I knew that my job was to help my students to grasp as much statistics as they could. So that was the content knowledge.

Todd [00:21:27] But what Dee points out is is more than just content knowledge here. If we want people to apply things, we have to teach them to apply. If we want them to synthesize, we have to teach them to synthesize. And then there’s a whole chunk of an area that people hadn’t thought about for years and years and that’s the aspect of caring for human beings, the respect that we show in the classroom. Which by the way shows up in teaching evaluations all the time. And even the process of learning to learn.

Todd [00:21:52] So if we take the human side of this whole taxonomy or the concept of learning that’s very very important component to the actual learning process. You know we care whether or not a student learns and helping the student to be a better learner in addition to saying here’s the content you need to learn.

Bonni [00:22:09] There were a couple of studies that you mentioned that I wasn’t familiar with, I’m Hake from 1990 and Carl Wieman both have looked at group work. Can you share a little bit about what they found about group work and what we can learn from in our own teaching?

Todd [00:22:26] Sure. So I mean Carl Wieman basically just look up the Carl Wieman Project there’s some really good stuff up there. One of the quick studies that they did was he would lecture but he would have graduate students do active learning on the same content and then they would give a quiz. And the graduate students teaching through active learning, those students did significantly better than his students when he lectured to them. And it was a demonstration that even if you are a Nobel Prize winning physicist that the pure concept of lecturing may not be the best way to acquire information for your students.

Todd [00:22:58] And so again reinforce the concept of incorporating engaged active learning. And Richard Hake, a physicist. Lots of good stuff comes out of physics actually for active engaged learning. But he did kind of summary of 6,000 students that he looked at and found that essentially if you only lectured, you never had the same gains as you did when you started to incorporate aspects of active engaged learning.

Todd [00:23:24] So both of those individuals and several others out there doing the same thing are demonstrating that lecturing alone simply does not return the same kind of advances that you get when you add in engaged active kinds of learning. Which by the way tying back into an earlier point you made, when we do that either ors that doesn’t mean we stop lecturing and do engage learning, it means that we have to bring engaged learning into the classroom.

Bonni [00:23:50] This is the point in the show when I ask you to be funny. And I ask you to be funny and make a joke about something we talked about a few moments ago. Because I can’t go on to the next one until you share quickly about this onion story that you found. I realize I’m being a little choppy here but I think people will be able to follow because that was just priceless and I’ll link to it in the show notes.

Todd [00:24:12] Yeah it was one I found a long time ago was back in 2000 or 2002 somewhere in there. And it was an Onion article and you caught me off guard Bonni because I don’t have in front of me but.

Bonni [00:24:22] Of course.

Todd [00:24:22] So the article itself was Parents of Nasal Learners Demand an Odor Based Curriculum. And as the onion is so good to do with these things, if we stop and think for just a minute the real danger of this whole concept of having a learning style is if I’m a visual learner, which I just had a few seconds ago, if I’m a visual learner and you don’t teach with visuals then I can’t possibly learn from you. And the dilemma is as soon as I say I can’t learn from you, that’s when learning stops it’s not because there’s a failure of having pictures or visual images it’s because in my head I don’t think I can learn.

Todd [00:24:58] So this article was so perfect. It has a little picture of a small girl who’s kind of agonizing over a book and the caption is a nasal learner struggling with an odorless textbook. And then my favorite quote which I do have memorized at least I am going to try and I think I do was “my 15 year old daughter Chloe used to goof off with her friends and get into trouble said Michael Sweeney of Oswego New York. Now I realize all those D’s and F’s did not represent any failure on my daughter’s part, but rather the school’s failure to provide appropriate nasal based curriculum. If you don’t teach the way my kid learns it isn’t her fault.” And that’s the real danger.

Bonni [00:25:39] That one is particularly priceless to me because part of my dissertation was on the locus of control. That idea that how we explain what happens to us. And if I’ve got a very external locus of control then I’m going to blame my daughter’s lack of learning on somebody else that didn’t teach her with her preferred learning style. It’s wonderful.

Todd [00:26:01] it is. But I have to jump in. We can’t leave this topic without at least pointing out that odor is annoying credibly important retrieval cue. So ironically the concept of learning through odor differentiation, actually there is something there that could be said for.

Bonni [00:26:16] I want to share a quick story and then I want to hear you tell me more about that. The quick story is that I smelled of vinegar, something like 10 years ago and instantly had a flashback from my childhood. I’m terrible at remembering things from childhood. My brother has a mind that can really retrieve stuff from childhood and I just can’t. Instantly remembered taking a drink of the Easter Egg dye at Easter thinking that it was my sprite. This is before it had th color for the Easter eggs in there was an instant thing and that does remind me of just how powerful our scent is and memory but I don’t know that much about it. So tell us a little bit more about how scent is a trigger for memory.

Todd [00:26:57] Well it’s just the way the brain is wired but it’s a retrieval cue. We have all kinds of retrieval cues. The human brain is an amazing amazing thing in how it sets it up so that we can remember so many things. I mean you have millions and millions of pieces of information and we may not be Watson, he might kick our butts on Jeopardy but by and large getting through the day requires us to be able to pull information up kind of at will. We’ve got to be able to get to it. However if it’s always there, then of course it will be overwhelming there’s no way we could be processing all that all the time kind of thinking of the ram on a computer kind of concept. So what odors do is they provide those really strong retrieval cues.

Todd [00:27:36] And in fact, if you’re selling a house a lot of people know this if you’re going to sell the house one of the best things you can do when you have an open house is to bake something. And the concept of baking some cookies, baking some bread, is that folks come through the door they take a deep breath they smell that and “Ah it just feels like home.” And so it has all kinds of impact not only on our cognitive memories but also on our emotions.

Bonni [00:28:02] The last person I want to share about before we move on to the recommendations segment, I’m sure we can wrap up in less than 60 seconds. Hahaha I say. It was an incredibly powerful talk about inclusion and the presenters name as Catherine Plank and that was the first time I had ever met her and it was incredible it was an amazing presentation. And the thing I think she is particularly gifted that is having a conversation about inclusion which so often will use these really powerful words that tend to make some people defensive like “privilege.” And she did it in such a way that invited people in to have a conversation. And I just know you had some thoughts on how she might have been able to do such a powerful thing without creating the usual sense of defensiveness.

Todd [00:28:52] First of all, I think Catherine is just amazing individual. I’ve just always been very impressed with how she thinks about things and how she comes across to others in the way that she presents ideas. I believe that she somehow has this wonderful balance of she deep in her soul believes in equity and equality and just fairness and all of those things. She’s just down in her soul, she believes that. But she doesn’t ever come across as trying to tell you you should believe that too. It’s almost have she just kind of wonders aloud. It’s kind a “I wonder why is it that people would be treated differently in this.” She doesn’t tell you you should treat them the same, she’s kind of curious why they wouldn’t be. And I think if you have this deep seated belief in something without trying to force it on somebody else in an inquisitive nature that you just kind of express out loud, it draws other people in.

Todd [00:29:44] And so instead of people being turned off and trying to be defensive against what she says I find them kind of leaning forward and wanting to know why she thinks that and then it starts to make them think the same way in terms of “Ah. I wonder why that is.” And that brings about change. I just I just think she does a phenomenal job of that.

Bonni [00:30:01] I’m definitely going to invite her on the show and with your permission will definitely drop your name. Todd’s been on the show you should come. She was just a delight to hear. And I’m actually going to end the main part of the show with a quote that she started her presentation with and then I know each of us has at least one thing if not more to recommend.

Bonni [00:30:19] This is a quote from John Moore, Penn State teacher too, “The instructor in a group inquiry must be prepared to lose control of the direction in which the class is going and prepared to travel down dark alleys with bold students.”

Todd [00:30:37] That’s a great quote.

Bonni [00:30:38] Yeah. We started with the thickets and we’re ending with the thickets.

Todd [00:30:44] I don’t think we have enough new quotes like those things. We need to dig around for somebody who said something like that yesterday or something.

Bonni [00:30:51] Yeah.

Todd [00:30:52] It’s got to be around. I just we got to find those. Those are such great powerful words.

Bonni [00:30:56] Yeah. My recommendation is going to be a service called Sli.do. It’s sli.do although you can also get it from slides.do.com. And it actually is related to a connection that I made at the conference and it’s Mike Truong from Azusa Pacific University. And it was one of those great things where we just had an instant connection in terms of our passion for teaching and using technology to facilitate learning. And this is a tool that has gotten a lot out of.

Bonni [00:31:23] And I got so passionate about it, I actually ended up learning how to work it overnight and it wasn’t hard and used it in my presentation and I’ll be using it in a presentation on Monday when I present to our full faculty at our university. It’s great.

Bonni [00:31:36] So what it does is it combines two needs that we have any time we’re going to present to a relatively large group of people. One thing we might want to do is to get them to be asking their questions but I don’t know anything about other people’s groups of faculty when you pull them together, sometimes it’s the loudest voice or the quick voice that’s the first one to speak and maybe you want to give other people an opportunity to ask questions.

Bonni [00:32:00] So it starts to pull questions and there’s just an event code that it makes for whatever event you’re having and people can ask questions whenever they have them. And then other people can vote up with the little thumbs up like button so you can start to get a sense of which questions would be most important to address first. And which ones the group is most interested in hearing.

Bonni [00:32:20] And I did that a little bit with the group and then was able to answer other questions that we didn’t get to as a follow up and point them over to the Web site, it worked really well.

Bonni [00:32:28] And then the other need that we so often have is to create that sense of whether it’s wanting to have students do retrieval or whether it’s wanting to get their opinion about something or want to do some sort of problem based instruction that type of thing. So if we want to do polls or questions whether they’re multiple choice or open ended we can do that in there as well. The free version is pretty remarkable to me. Up to 1000 people at an event you could have on the free version. But only have three of these questions that you might pose. And then they have an education pricing for $99 a year, you can have unlimited polls and up to 1000 people which is a pretty good price for educators. So actually today I’ll be purchasing my annual membership so I can get more than those three polls per session.

Todd [00:33:15] That sounds like a great resource.

Bonni [00:33:17] It’s great. And what is it that you’d like to recommend today?

Todd [00:33:21] Well you know I don’t like the self-serving approach of this but I don’t tend to do it a lot which is one of those things that I never do this but I am today. So you know Claire Major and Michael Harris and I wrote a book just a couple of months ago that I’m really really excited about and it’s called Teaching for Learning: 101 Intentionally Designed Activities to Put Students on the Path to Success.

Todd [00:33:43] And the reason we pulled this together as so many people are talking about and incorporating active engaged learning in the classroom but a lot of folks don’t know how to do it or don’t know what the literature that is behind it. So these 101 activities essentially not only demonstrate how to do the act of learning but actually talk about the research behind them and some of the foundational research articles to support each one of them. So I think that’s a helpful book for getting rolling on more engaged learning.

Bonni [00:34:08] I’m so glad that you recommended it and I’m glad that you pushed past that hesitancy because it isn’t something that you normally do and I know this is something you’re really proud of. And I also know that you’re going to be coming back on this show. I don’t remember when we talked about but to talk about another resource or was that the resource? Regardless you’re going to be back to share some more because this is just what I hope is just the start to continue the conversation.

Todd [00:34:32] Happy to come back anytime. You have a fabulous show you do here and always enjoy speaking with you.

Bonni [00:34:36] Thanks. I’m going to actually recommend one quick thing before we close. I did promise it’s not an advertisement for the Lilly Conference but I’d like to turn it into an advertisement for the Lilly Conference to say this is a phenomenal conference. And I know that the one in California, I just think it’s lovely because it’s such a great place where it’s located. But there are five other locations where Lilly conferences take place, is that correct?

Todd [00:34:58] Yeah a total of five. And I work really really hard. The most important thing to me is community which really really made me feel wonderful about what you talked about the conferences. It’s not a concept of just bringing a bunch of people together. I want folks together who really share with one another and feel comfortable exposing what they’re trying and what works well and doesn’t work. But it’s all about community and we try to keep it down around 300 to 400 people so it really does give you that opportunity to have some variety and learn different things, but also not feel overwhelmed by the number of people there. And so I appreciate you being there you were a fabulous community member and you made it a better event.

Bonni [00:35:34] Well I will be putting the link in the show notes to the Lilly Conferences in general and the one held here in California and just hope someone will have a chance to make it out here perhaps next year to California and we can make some connections in person.

Todd [00:35:46] Excellent, thank you so much.

Bonni [00:35:47] Thanks again to Todd for all your planning on the conference. It was fabulous. And also for investing your time when you just got home into supporting the listening community.

Todd [00:35:56] Thank you, appreciate the opportunity.

Bonni [00:35:58] Thanks once again to Todd Zakrajsek for joining me to share about the key learnings that we had from the Lilly Conference. And thanks all of you for listening and being able to take away a little bit yourself.

Bonni [00:36:12] As always I’d like to remind you if you have yet to subscribe to the e-mail newsletter that I send out every week, it’s just one e-mail and you get all the show notes from the links and all of the links of the things that we talk about as well as when you first sign up you get an educational technologies guidebook that gives you 19 tools to help you integrate technology and with your teaching. All of that can be found at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

Bonni [00:36:39] And I also welcome your feedback on the show. It’s one of the ways that the show is growing in terms not just of size but also in strength of community. And you can give feedback at teachinginhighered.com/feedback.

Bonni [00:36:52] And as always would suggest and plead and beg. No not beg but just encourage prod you to go and rate or review the show that again helps build the strength of the community and help us connect with one another better. As we continue to improve on our teaching. Thanks for listening.

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.