Teaching in Higher Ed

Challenging My Thinking About Teaching

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Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

I'm reading a book for an upcoming episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast that has me reflecting on the choices I make in my pedagogy, particularly with regards to assessment.

The College Classroom Assessment Compendium: A Practical Guide to the College Instructor’s Daily Assessment Life, by Jay Parkes and Dawn Zimmaro

It's written from a highly prescriptive perspective. Each section starts out with the authors' recommendation regarding various aspects of assessment.

  • Should we give points for attendance?
  • Is extra credit a good practice?
  • Should late assignments be accepted?

Reflecting on Needed Changes

I have found myself agreeing with about 90% of their recommendations and wrestling with about 10% of their proposals. Each time I find myself mentally debating with them, I am able to revisit the rationale they give for their advice. Then, I discover that I am either more aligned with what they suggested than I originally realized, or I admit that I have some work to do in how I approach a given means of assessment.

Resources for Teaching Transformations

I was interviewed for the EdSurge podcast recently about how my teaching has changed since I first started the podcast back in June of 2014. I tried to discipline myself not to be too verbose regarding this particular set of questions. It would have been easier to answer how my teaching hasn't been changed from almost 200 conversations with such phenomenal educators.

I came across a number of articles in recent weeks that encompass a few of those transformational areas in my teaching that I wanted to share with you.

The more I learn about teaching, the more I discover the importance of being adaptable in our practice. Our collective humility is essential for becoming better able to serve our students.

Teaching in Higher Ed Transcripts

Episode 200 is coming in April. I'm excited to share a conversation with fellow educators about what we have changed our minds about regarding our teaching in recent years.

I was going to keep it a surprise until episode 200 airs, but have received such valuable feedback when I shared the news with others that I have decided to start spreading the news. The Teaching in Higher Ed podcast is going to have transcripts of every past episode and the ones going forward.

Teaching in Higher Ed podcast transcripts

We are still working out the precise user interface that will be available to access the transcripts, but hope that it will make the podcast more accessible, as well as having it be easier to discover. Here's a couple of transcripts to whet your appetite for what is to come:

If you have any input in terms of making the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast transcripts as beneficial for faculty as possible, please get in touch with me.

My husband and I had already begun to invest our own money in this important endeavor. However, when I recently asked for input on the transcripts on the POD Network listserv, we were able to discover an unexpected partner to support us on the financial end of things.

The West Virginia University Press Teaching and Learning in Higher Education book series’ editor, James M. Lang, has been a regular guest on Teaching in Higher Ed since the beginning. Jim was on episode 19, episode 92, and episode 146 (with Ken Bain).

Many of the other WVU Press’s Teaching and Learning in Higher Education authors have also been on the podcast in the past. The series is providing financial support to make the first 200 episodes of Teaching in Higher Ed available in transcript form.

As a part of our partnership, other authors will be visiting the podcast throughout the rest of 2018, about once every other month. I am looking forward to making the transcripts available to all of you and to share about the wonderful resources on how to make our teaching more effective with the books in the WVU Press’s Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series.

Discount Code for Preorders of My Forthcoming Book

As I shared recently, my new book is now available for preorder. Use the code TPOP20 to receive a 20% discount at checkout for:

The Productive Online Professor: A Practical Guide

Bonni Stachowiak

Forward by Robert Talbert

Thrive Online Series

I will be doing some type of giveaway to those who preorder using the Stylus website, though I haven't quite figured out what that is going to be just yet.

Let's just say that Katie Linder's Academic Book Promotion Toolkit has given me plenty of ideas and resources to spark my imagination and then some.

Lessons From My Email Emergency

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This past week, I have been experiencing what can best be described as an email emergency. Somehow, all my email folders got erased and I went through processing what life would be like to lose all the emails I had ever been sent using one of my two primary email addresses.

The mostly happy news is that it looks like I am going to emerge out of this with my emails in place. However, I won’t be able to get the multitudes of hours back into my life that I have spent on this project.

Less is More – When it Comes to Email Folders

I had over 35 different folders and subfolders in my email storage structure. As I worked on moving my emails over from the backups, I decided not to replicate the same structure this time around. Instead, I kept it as lean as possible, knowing that search has come such a long way and I’m likely to be able to find what I need from that method of retrieval.

My folder hierarchy is now as follows:

  • Archive
  • Encouragement
  • Family
  • Humor
  • Innovate Learning
  • Personal
  • Purchases
  • Reference
  • Vanguard

There are some people who recommend not having any folders at all, except for archive. If you use an email app on your smartphone, you can likely swipe to one side and automatically send an email right into the archive folder. You can search by sender, receiver, subject line, or even in the contents of the emails, in most email clients.

I think I will probably trim down the number of folders I have in my teaching/work email, too. I like to have a folder for the current semester, in order to zero in on student emails that have come in related to classes. After a semester ends, I move all emails over to the archive folder.

I have a folder directly related to my role of Director of Teaching Excellence and Digital Pedagogy – for those times when I need to get a sense of what I have been focused on in recent weeks. But many of my other folders are excessive and I have far too many subfolders.

When I finish my work-related email clean up, it will look something like this:

  • Archive
  • 1-teaching-excellence-and-digital-pedagogy
  • 2018s
  • Departments
  • Encouragement
  • Personal
  • Research

I can feel myself resisting this change, even as I type it up. Since I was “forced” to in dealing with my email emergency on my personal account, it made it easier to “rip the band-aid off” in that case. I can now see how much more streamlined things are going to be, so hopefully I can remember that when I get to making the change on my work account.

Backups are Essential

Dave and I use a service called FastMail for our Innovate Learning emails. We pay extra for backups – and this past week’s adventures are a testament to why. If I hadn’t had a backup plan with them, I would have lost most of my emails from many years of email use.

Their response time has been less-than-ideal regarding my email emergency. However, the backups of my emails were well worth the money we paid and somewhat worked as expected.

Sanebox is a Game Changer

Another service I have had to live without, as I get this all sorted out, is SaneBox. It sorts through my emails and leaves only the most essential ones in my primary inbox. I have been lost without it. You can receive a free SaneBox trial if you want to experience the sanity that only SaneBox can deliver.

Email Clients are Not Task Managers

The biggest change in how I have needed to work this past week, while all this gets sorted out, involves leaving emails in my inbox for longer than normal. I typically keep with a “touch it once” approach to email. When I first look at an email, I read it for “action” – is there anything that requires action buried somewhere within this message?

If the answer is yes, and it only is going to take me two minutes or less to perform that action, I take care of it right then. If it will take more than two minutes, the email is sent over to my task manager (OmniFocus) and can then be prioritized amongst all the other things I have on my plate.

When we don’t do this, we allow others to dictate to us what our priorities should be, instead of allowing their requests to be considered in the context of the other things that are important to accomplish.

Speaking of task managers, The Sweet Set up just did a nice write up of their favorite task managers, along with recommending Things3 as their top pick.

Next Steps

I have recorded an episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast that describes my process for managing email in detail.

Other episodes related to productivity include:

Preorder The Productive Online Professor

I’m excited to announce that preorders for my new book: The Productive Online Professor are available now. The book discusses even more methods for managing email more productively, along with plenty of other topics to help us have more peace in our lives, so we can be even more present for our students. Please consider pre-ordering a copy to support the launch of the book, not to mention your own potential productivity boost.

Listener Question: Essential Reading on Pedagogy

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James Lee got in touch on Twitter and asked me the following:

Hi, Bonni. I enjoy listening to your podcast. Do you have a blog post on what you consider to be essential reading for pedagogy in higher education? If not, what would you consider to be essential reading for those who want to become better college teachers?”

As I responded to James, I do not recall having written such a post, though the other day I inadvertently put some fresh strawberries “away” in the refrigerator only to have my husband discover them in a kitchen drawer. I may not be operating on all cylinders this week.

I did find a post about how I organize my physical books, but nothing containing a list of favorite books on teaching.

Your question is harder than it might seem. I love reading about teaching and have found pretty much every book I have ever read on the subject useful to me in my pedagogy. It is hard to commit to a ranked list. They all should be recommended since they have all shaped my teaching.

Since I need to pick up our kids from school in a couple of hours, I am going to limit myself to five, even though I could easily choose many more than that. James Lang wrote a list of his top ten books on The Chronicle of Higher Education that is worth a look. I forced myself not to re-read it until I finished this post since I suspect I might have been influenced by his selections.

I also know that I am completely remiss in not having yet read Parker Palmer's: The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of A Teacher's Life. How I have not read it yet is beyond me… Even just the first few sentences beckon us to enter in…

Top Five Books on Pedagogy

Below are my top picks for essential reading for those who teach in higher education. I can already envision a part two needed for this post, as there are so many I am leaving out.

What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain

This is the first book I can remember reading about teaching in the context of higher education, specifically. It came out right about the time I started teaching (first as an adjunct – and then as a tenure-track professor).

Bain (2004) reports the restyle of a longitudinal study and outlines the following:

  • What the best teachers know and understand
  • How they prepare to teach
  • The expectations they have of their students
  • What they do while they are teaching
  • How they treat their students
  • The approaches they take to evaluate their teaching

Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses (2nd Edition), by L. Dee Fink 

I remember being incredibly inspired by Bain (2004) and wanting to challenge myself even more in my teaching. Fink’s book on Creating Significant Learning Experiences caused me to think about how we should consider ourselves more as designers of experiences for our students in their learning. He presents a taxonomy of different types of learning experiences and which ones are more effective in particular circumstances.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Fink had written the first edition of his book about designing learning experiences a year before Bain reported out the results of his study). However, I noticed that Fink has a second edition out and that is the one I am linking to in this post.

Effective Grading, by Barbara E. Walvoord & Virginia Johnson Anderson

It was not long before I realized how much help I needed with regards to grading. My background had initially been in corporate training and traditional grading was never a part of my teaching.

While this book was initially published in 1998, it still had timely advice for me regarding giving my students feedback on their learning. The appendix includes the AAHE’s Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning, which is known for having “aged” quite well. I noted a newer version than the one I had on my bookshelf and am linking to the 2009 edition here.

Introduction to Rubrics: An Assessment Tool to Save Grading Time, Convey Effective Feedback, and Promote Student Learning (2nd Edition), by Dannelle D. Stevens  & Antonia J. Levi

As I considered ways to make my grading more effective and to help students have a more clear sense of what was expected on a given assignment, I found myself in need of instruction on how to create a rubric. This short book gets a lot across in a short number of pages and provides plenty of examples.

There are many who criticize rubrics as representing too mechanistic of an approach to learning. I will admit to still wrestling with these critiques, while still finding benefits to using rubrics for some types of assignments. For newer faculty, I would still recommend becoming familiar with rubrics, especially to attempt to fight against the potential for subjectivity in one’s grading.

Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, by James M. Lang 

A more recent addition to my books on pedagogy is James Lang’s book: Small Teaching. His approach in writing this book was to explore the small changes we could make in our teaching that would have a big impact. It can be so overwhelming to be a new teacher and this book provides a solid foothold for effective practices.

None of us who teach in higher education should be without a copy of Small Teaching.

The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom (3rd Edition), by Stephen D. Brookfield 

Those of you who are counting can already tell that I could not do it. Limiting myself to just five would mean leaving out another book that has had a tremendous impact on my teaching. Even if you read one of Brookfield’s earlier additions, it is worth picking The Skillful Teacher up, again, to read the new chapters on:

  • Teaching critical thinking
  • Using play and creativity in the classroom
  • Teaching in teams
  • Helping students take responsibility for learning
  • Teaching about racism
  • Exercising teacher power responsibly

Your Turn

I already know I left a bunch of wonderful books out of this list. What essential reading would you recommend for those looking to become more effective at facilitating learning?

Question from a Listener: Open Textbooks

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I received a series of questions about open textbooks from a person who attended my keynote at the University of Georgia in October of 2017.

***

Greetings! I heard you speak at UGA about publishing open textbooks with your students and I decided that I had to do this too.

So here I am, teaching a class with 20 undergrads, and this crazy idea to have students research Confederate monuments in the state, and write up a resolution to a specific monument in Georgia that they researched over the course of the semester.

The goal of the book is to document each monuments' specific history as well as allow students to express their solutions as to how they believe the monuments should look in the future.

I know that I will get my students research and writing where it needs to be, but I am totally ignorant to this self publishing process. Looking through the different publication options, I wondered why did you choose Pressbooks over just uploading straight to Amazon?

I do not want to charge any money for the book as I am fearful that my students may think that I am profiting from their work–which I know will not be the case–but that still nagging feeling in the back of my mind. I would love any and all advice that you might have for me regarding the process. I am hoping to include photographs (taken by my students) in the book as well.

Also—I love your podcast in every way imaginable. It re-energizes me daily.

***

Thank you for the edifying words about the podcast. It is inspiring to learn that the keynote I gave at UGA has inspired you and that you have embarked on this journey.

At the end of 2017, I wrote up some details on My First Experience Co-Writing an Open Textbook, in case you haven’t seen that post yet.

You pose some questions that I didn’t address in that post, however. Here are some thoughts about what you asked.

Why Pressbooks?

My experience with Pressbooks has led me to the belief that it is probably the best option out there for creating open textbooks. That being said, I am very new to this process and haven’t done an exhaustive search or extensive comparisons. This open textbook about how to write an open textbook is a good guide and happens to be written using Pressbooks. Another similar and excellent resource is A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students.

Options like using Github or Gitbook to get started with open textbooks seem daunting for those who are less familiar with those tools, already. Since Pressbooks is based on WordPress, people who have done some blogging in the past are likely to feel quite comfortable in that environment.

For those who aren't ready to write their own open textbook, it is well worth exploring the many sites that offer open textbooks that you can adopt as is, or customize. To name a few such sites: Open Textbook Library, KPU's resources and links, and Harvard DART.

What you are describing seems like a perfect use case for Pressbooks. You could create a book on Pressbooks and have a digital version available at no charge to you (or your students).

Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers gives you a look at how this works. His book is available on any computer or device that has a web browser. His book is an example of what’s available with the free version of Pressbooks.

Why Amazon (CreateSpace)?

If you wanted to make a copy of your book available in print, the free version of Pressbooks would not be a good option. There are many options for print-on-demand services and I have also not done too much investigation in this area.

I went with the advice from a guy I met who works for Pressbooks. He said that if I didn’t have any ethical issues with using an Amazon-owned company, that CreateSpace had some good options.

Most of my “heavy lifting” happened in Pressbooks. I used their cover creator and one of their templates for all my design and formatting. Then, I used CreateSpace to distribute hard copies across various publishing platforms (most namely, Amazon).

Charging Students

I completely understand your concern about charging students for a textbook that you would potentially profit from. If I were teaching undergraduates and writing an open textbook with them, I would likely keep everything in digital form via Pressbooks.

My class was a group of doctoral students who were thrilled with the potential of having something they wrote in printed form. As of January 16, 2018, I have made half of what I paid for a Pressbooks paid book. I suspect that I won’t likely make all of it back, but don’t mind losing money on this kind of an endeavor.

I shared with the students that there was a potential for me to eventually make a small sum of money. I had them sign an online document indicating their understanding of that possibility.

What helped me with the potential ethical challenges in this process was that students were not bound to purchase a copy of the book. It was an option that they had if they wanted to buy one. Transparency was essential. Everyone understood my costs and how I was attempting to reduce them or eliminate them in this way.

Many Questions Remain

I know I still have so much to learn about open textbooks. As I was researching your questions, I came across Ingram Spark, a self-publishing platform that uses Pressbooks as its content editor, that looks like it could potentially save me money with having a print and ebook created of my doctoral students’ books in the future.

I wish I would have documented more of the steps that I had to go through in generating all the needed information for the printed and ebook editions. I suspect that come March (the next time I will be co-writing an open textbook with students), I will be scratching my head, trying to remember what I selected the last time I was in Pressbooks and Createspace.

Frictionless Systems

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Frictionless Systems

This past week, I began emerging from a bout with the flu. Even though I still have a bit of a cough and a runny nose, it has felt delightful just to be out of bed and returning to some sort of normalcy.

Frictionless Systems

One thing I was grateful for during this season was the productivity systems I have in place. I was able to determine what I had fallen behind on and how to make adaptations to priorities I had been unable to focus on.

Weekly Reviews

I have written and podcasted before about the importance of weekly reviews in the past.

Each time I complete a weekly review, I come out of it with less stress and more of a sense of the most important things to focus on during a given week.

TextExpander (Windows, Mac, iOS)

I officially recommended TextExpander on episode 114, but have mentioned it many times in past shows and blog posts. TextExpander lets us save time by “quickly inserting snippets – email addresses, signatures, code chunks, form letters images – as you type, using a simple keyboard shortcut, or custom abbreviations. Save time without typos and copy/paste.”

I recently learned how to have TextExpander type something into the subject line of an email and enter the rest of some text into the body of an email. TextExpander also has room for customization of each “snippet.”

When I have a podcast guest scheduled, I send them a couple of emails about being on the show. This process is made much simpler with TextExpander. Each episode’s show notes are also produced that much faster using TextExpander snippets.

Ulysses (Mac/iOS)

My blog posts and podcast show notes all start in this brilliant text editing application. From their website:

A pleasant, focused writing experience combined with effective document management, fast syncing and flexible export make Ulysses the first choice for writers of all kinds.”

Sanebox (Gmail/Google, Apple iCloud, Outlook.com, Office 365, Yahoo, and many more)

Their promotional text reads: “Today is the day you take back control of your inbox.” They aren’t kidding you. I can’t imagine going back to life without SaneBox.

We prioritize your Inbox and let you know if an email didn't receive a reply.

We can also sort your Inbox, keep track of reminders and snoozed emails, rescue real email from your spam folder, upload attachments to your cloud, and more…”

Airmail (Mac, iOS)

I have found Airmail to be a wonderful way to get through email quickly. My favorite feature is the keyboard shortcuts that are available. I hardly ever have to use my trackpad when I’m moving emails into folders and processing incoming mail.

Fantastical (Mac, iOS)

I use Fantastical primarily on my Mac, though they do have an iOS app, as well. The main feature that people love about Fantastical is the ability to “use natural language to quickly create events and reminders.”

I find that I make more use of the ability to have different collections of calendars to switch between. Sometimes, I might just want to see our family members’ respective calendars and not pay attention to my work calendar at all. In other instances, I may only want to see my work and personal calendars and leave Dave’s and the kids’ calendars out of the picture.

Here’s how they describe this feature (calendar sets) on their website:

Fantastical 2 lets you quickly toggle multiple calendars on or off with a single click, so you can focus on what's more important in that moment. The days of going back and forth, clicking multiple times, just to hide and show your calendars are over.

But we didn't stop there. You can even automatically switch Calendar Sets based on your location (i.e. Work and Home). How cool is that?”

Paprika (Windows, Android, Kindle, iOS, Mac)

As some of you might have heard me talk about, I recently joined the club of those who are obsessed with the Instant Pot. It has me cooking a lot more often and taking advantage of my recipe app regularly.

Paprika “is an app that helps you organize your recipes, make meal plans, and create grocery lists. Using Paprika's built-in browser, you can save recipes from anywhere on the web.

Want to access your recipes on your phone or tablet? Our free cloud sync service allows you to seamlessly sync your data across all of your devices.”

Paprika app

You can also more easily adjust the ingredients you will need, based on different desired serving sizes. You definitely can’t do that quick of a set of calculations with a cookbook, or a recipe you found on Pinterest.

When Paprika says “you can easily save recipes” on the web, it means it. You copy a link over to Paprika and it extracts the needed data from the website and adds it into all the various fields (cooking time, ingredients, instructions, etc.).

Your Turn

What apps and services are you finding are helping you create a more frictionless experience?

Thanks to everyone who replies to my calls for entertainment help on Twitter while I was sick. Let’s just say I have been watching more than my fair share of this one and this one in recent weeks.

I also am so appreciate of Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody who helped me on his new Research Hacking Slack channel to troubleshoot a TextExpander / Ulysses workflow issue I was having.