Teaching in Higher Ed

Sharing Their Stories

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Sharing Their Stories

As I mentioned in last week's post about finding good partners, one of my doctoral students posed some intriguing questions to me that I have been carrying with me these past two weeks. In this post, I share more of her specific questions and give my second of several recommendations.

Sharing Online

One of the individuals in the class shared a powerful way in which she was feeling inspired to communicate online. However, she had concerns about some of the dangers of doing this kind of sharing online.

I gave her a few suggestions right away, but suggested that she follow up with me with an email, as there was a lot more I could say on the topics. Her emails have been edited to protect her (and her students’) identity, as well as for context.

The Questions

How do I blog about controversial topics safely online?

For example, I work in an urban school where a lot of teacher abuse from students occur.  How can I create a safe atmosphere for others to discuss these experiences without being judged or shamed by others who don't understand what it is to support students who have been identified as traumatized?

In addition, to the societal view that you must be a “bad” teacher or doing something wrong if you don't have classroom management or positive relationships with others.

I am also interested in developing powerful dialogues and relationships amongst parents and teachers.  A partnership that will create collaboration and supports for students, specifically in the areas of special education, (moderate to serve and emotional/behavioral disorders).  Again, pertaining to parents in urban areas (i.e. uneducated, multiple jobs, single parents, foster parents, grandparents, etc.)”

Sharing Their Stories

One of the most powerful ways you could have an impact is to share the stories of those you are looking to serve. When Clint Smith was on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on episode 141, he shared about the dangers of silence and how important our voices are. He spoke so proudly of his students and their capabilities and capacity.

The Ear Hustle podcast is another tremendous example of sharing context for people who want to learn more about life inside of a prison's walls. An episode that made me laugh was episode six, entitled “The Boom Boom Room,” about conjugal visits. Episode nine made me weep, as they shared about death and dying in the prison.

Jesse Stommel is another person who regularly challenges us to respect our students. As Jesse explains why he no longer grades, he stresses the importance of starting by trusting our students. Even though the main topic of episode 57, when Jesse was a guest, was about Twitter, the thread that went throughout the entire episode was regarding the importance of kindness in our teaching.

On episode #148, Bronwyn Harris shared about her book, Literally Unbelievable. Despite describing incredibly challenging situations, Bronwyn displays a profound respect for her students, their families, and the people who seek to improve such devastating circumstances. The Deeper Learning podcast, produced by the Orange County Department of Education, is another example of powerful storytelling about people making a difference in the educational community.

One of the common characteristics about all the examples of exquisite storytelling is that there is no place for venting about frustrations regarding students. Anger over the difficult environment that they have to navigate? Yes. But, venting about any challenges related directly to the people that they serve is off limits.

An empathetic voice is present throughout all of these wide-ranging stories. The more empathy we can create toward those we are trying to serve, the more we can do the difficult work of coming up with sustainable solutions.

Getting Started

One of the biggest pieces of advice I have for you, as you reflect even more on your digital identity, is to determine who your work will be targeted toward.

Are you creating content to help other teachers have greater empathy for their students? Or, do you want to tell stories and provide resources to help families better navigate their children's educational paths? 

Once you have a narrow focus on who you are going to be talking to, finding stories to share becomes a lot easier.

One of the best resources I have found for storytelling, recently, is the Power Your Podcast with Storytelling course by Alex Blumberg for the CreativeLive site. If you are interested in taking the course, use this link to get $15 off (and I will also get $15 for the referral).

Alex used to be a producer for the This American Life podcast and is one of the most phenomenal storytellers I know. The episode of his StartUp podcast called Shadowed Qualities was one of the most poignant examples of the “stuff” we bring into our work communities I have ever heard.

I am thrilled that you are asking these questions and look forward to seeing where this all heads, as you create more content in the coming weeks on your blog.

Finding Good Partners

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I received a question from one of my doctoral students that has me embarking on a multi-part post. I will share more about her question in subsequent posts. For now, my first piece of advice to her is  about finding good partners.

All of us educators will find ourselves lacking an understanding of context in many aspects of our work, if we are honest with ourselves. I am grateful to those who have helped me understand more about teaching underserved populations.

I continue to seek out ways to better understand the learners who are in my classrooms, as well as those in the community who won’t ever set foot on a college campus.

Find Good Partners

One way I work to keep developing myself is through finding good partners. I consider every podcast guest a partner in helping us all become more effective at facilitating learning. My higher education friendships are almost all based on some sense of being in solidarity with others who are working to make students’ lives better.

A more formal partnership that I have recently established is with ACUE: The Association of College and University Educators.

You may have heard ACUE mentioned on previous episodes. They have been regularly connecting me with potential podcast guests for about a year now.

ACUE was founded in 2014 by leaders in higher education to promote quality instruction at colleges and universities nationwide.

ACUE’s comprehensive Course in Effective Teaching Practices prepares college educators to implement all of the essential practices shown to improve student outcomes. This facilitated, online Course is offered to cohorts of faculty at participating institutions.

Educators who satisfy Course requirements earn a Certificate in Effective College Instruction endorsed by the American Council on Education (ACE).”

In the coming year, Teaching in Higher Ed and ACUE will collaborate on upcoming podcast episodes, as well as more in-depth content hosted on ACUE’s site with phenomenal educators.

As ACUE shares in their announcement about our partnership:

“As part of ACUE and Teaching in Higher Ed’s new collaboration, we’ll be blogging about popular conversations, hosting follow-on expert Q&As, and adding sights to the sounds with video excerpts from ACUE’s course library. ACUE members and podcast fans alike can look forward to these free resources as part of ACUE’s upcoming Expert Dive series.”

The first of these Deep Dives will profile Paul Blowers, as he shares how he leverages active learning approaches in STEM courses. I’m excited to speak with him in November and for all the other future conversations this partnership will enable.

Next Steps

While you may not establish formal partnerships, as the one I have described here. However, you will no doubt benefit from collaborations with your students’ family members, other teachers, and members of your community.

In future posts, I will share some resources about telling compelling stories, as I continue to answer this students’ questions.

On-ramps: Reflections on the 14th Annual Open Education Conference

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Photo: Seagull On Ramp by Orin Zebest on Flickr

On-ramps: Reflections on the 14th Annual Open Education Conference

At last week's OpenEd17 conference, Jim Luke introduced the idea of having on-ramps for faculty to get on board with open education initiatives at our various institutions.

Ever since then, I have been captivated by the analogy of on-ramps as a means of supporting learners.

  • In what ways did people provide me with ways to take my learning further regarding open education at OpenEd17?
  • What have I discovered as a better means for introducing students to new ideas in my teaching?
  • How do we address learners that are already speeding down a domain of knowledge's highway and have different needs to enhance their own learning than beginners do?

It seems like too daunting a task to attempt to give an overview of everything I discovered at OpenEd17. Instead, I will highlight a few key findings here, and assure you that my list of future potential podcast guests is larger than ever.

Start Somewhere

The first morning of the conference, we got to hear from a panel of students from Santa Ana College. They were articulate and celebrated what having open educational resources (OARs) in their courses has meant for them.

One of the panelists stressed that if faculty expect stellar assignments from their students, we should expect the same quality of work from ourselves. The overall message at this point in panel was that we should “just do it,” and start somewhere with our open education efforts.

Open Textbooks

I have been sharing recently that I'm embarking with my doctoral students on our first-ever open textbook endeavor. We are very early in the process (class just started last Saturday), but are all completely jazzed about what's possible.

Robin DeRosa's blog post on her open textbook efforts has been incredibly helpful to me, in considering how to get started. I decided to use Pressbooks for the composition and eventual distribution of the open textbook we will be writing.

Pressbooks is built on the popular blogging platform, WordPress. I am already familiar with WordPress, since that's what the Teaching in Higher Ed website uses. I was able to attend a session about the roadmap for future iterations of Pressbooks. They appear to be quite an innovative company and I'm excited to see what we are able to produce, using their service.

Screen shot of an open textbook by Michael A. Caulfield: Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers

Mike Caulfield has published an open textbook using Pressbooks. His Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers is an excellent source for helping to grow information literacy.

You can view Mike's presentation about the Digital Polarization Project online, thanks to Robin's filming efforts at OpenEd17. He also made his slides available online.

That's just the beginning of what's available through open textbooks. The Ohio State University Library has a great list of ways in which to search for books, using different websites.

Using already-available open textbooks is just the beginning of what's possible in open education. Many presenters stressed how faculty enjoy the ability to customize open textbooks to best meet their needs.

We were also encouraged to not replace one passive tool (a traditional textbook) with another passive tool (an open textbook). There are many ways in which we can make open educational resources engaging and active.

Keep Going

One way I am getting started is through OpenTextbooks. But, that is just the beginning, I know.

The OER (open educational resources) World Map is brimming with possibilities of where to possibly head next.

Where to head next with open education?

I hope to find colleagues at my institution who are ready to begin exploring how we might better serve our students through open education, even if it means starting in the smallest of ways.

Ken Bauer describes well the failures we will experience if we try to introduce too many new tools to faculty too quickly. He also shares questions he has, after attending OpenEd17, himself.

If you want to get more of a taste of what happened at OpenEd17, here's an OER video Digest that shares much more than what I have in this post.

Gratitude

I am thankful for all the people who gave so generously at OpenEd17. It was wonderful to get to meet some friends in person for the first time, while reuniting with other friends I haven't seen in a long while.

It all reminded me of some of the writing that Maha Bali did, after she met some friends in person for the first time at OER17.  The experience is difficult to describe. I will treasure the opportunities to be in-person with such magnificent and inspiring educators and appreciate that we have such wonderful ways to stay in touch.

Reflections on the 2017 Digital Media and Learning Conference

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DML conference
Credit: Jason Frohlichstein, Frohlichstein Inc. Design & Direction

It was my first time attending the Digital Media and Learning conference.

Then, I found out that it was actually the last year that the event would be held. Starting next year, DML will partner with the Connected Learning Summit, an entity associated with MIT. The merged conference will rotate each year from the East Coast (at MIT) to the West Coast (at UCI).

Still, I am grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this year's event.

SketchNotes from the DML Conference

Once again, I attempted to grow my sketchnotes skills. I still draw like a five year-old. But, I know that the only way to get better is to get more practice in, accompanied with additional resources to help structure the ways in which I attempt to build my skills.

Some of the attempts I made at DML are below, along with a few notes about what I took away from the sessions.

I wasn't familiar with Danah Boyd until attending DML. She's certainly someone now who I won't soon forget. Her presentation was called Learning All the Wrong Things. She described her plans for her talk as follows:

“I will interrogate some of the darker sides of networked media engagement: media manipulation, strategic harassment, and youth radicalization. And then we'll think through different kinds of interventions – and the unintended consequences of good intentions in a world where the internet mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly.” – Danah Boyd

You can view her keynote online (starts just after the 10 minute mark), as well as listen to the big announcement at the beginning of the video about their doing away with the DML conference and what is to come next.

Another person I had never heard of before DML was Esra'a Al-Shafei, “a Bahraini civil rights activist, blogger, and the founder and executive director of Mideast Youth and its related projects, including CrowdVoice.org.

I found her entire talk compelling and especially appreciated her descriptions of the ways in which music is amplifying the voices of those who would otherwise not be heard.

Another inspirational session was put on by two gifted individuals (Gabe Lyon and Edge Quintanilla) from the Chicago Architecture Foundation. They shared about DiscoverDesign.org, an “online platform where students, teachers, and mentors come together to design solutions for the real world.

Other Inspiring Sessions

There's only so much sketchnoting I can do before I wonder if I shouldn't give up hope. In other DML sessions, I took notes furiously and bookmarked items voraciously.

Elizabeth Lawley, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, gave a fantastic session entitled: Fork Your Syllabus, You Slacker: Using GitHub and Slack to Collaborate with Students (and Colleagues). She created some amazing supporting materials that are worth exploring.

Another well-documented session that is worth visiting is the page built by Remi Kalir, for his session called: Annotating DML. Remi is going to be on the podcast soon and I'm looking forward to learning even more from him.

There's so much more I could share about, but I need to head to bed to get ready for day one of the Open Education 2017 conference tomorrow.

Yes, it is quite the busy couple of weeks with conferences, but I really wanted to take advantage of these being so close to home. In the meantime, consider checking out some of the videos from the DML conference. Especially energizing are the ignite talks, which are just five minute presentations on a wide variety of topics.

 

A Listener Question: Catching Up

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I received the following question from a podcast listener this week:

Hi Bonni, Thank you so much for the podcast. I have found it so helpful!

I am a Logistics professional in the UK but I was asked to give some courses last week and this week in English in my subject at one of the French Grand Ecoles. I was able to put some dynamic lecturing, retrieval practice, bloom's taxonomy, small teaching, etc into practice it was great fun! – yes I have listened to lots of the podcasts! I have been teaching a small group of 15 and 2 lecture classes of 100 per class.

One thing if you have any advice… Next Monday is my last session teaching in the repeated lectures ( 2 hours each ) in the afternoon. I have realised I have a large amount material to cover in this last 2 hour session – ( I went a bit slow on the first two lectures and now have a lot to get in as well as to get the students ready for a test).

Any advice on what to do when time is short in the classroom and you have a lot to get through? I can't change the deadline!

Cheers again, Michael

I have found myself in this sort of situation more times than I care to remember. I get excited about a topic (often times because the students really got into it) and I lose track of time.

As you have already indicated, ideally we plan more margin into our class planning to allow for these sorts of fun detours. However, the reality is that sometimes, we just need to catch up.

Here are a few thoughts I have on how to approach your Monday session:

  • Utilize online resources. Provide students with resources to review outside of class. I suspect you are already doing that, but if Monday can be more about highlighting essential parts of the content that students are often confused by, that's a lot easier than trying to review it all.
  • Start with retrieval practice. Better yet, do some retrieval practice during the first part of Monday's session. That way, you are not required to guess where points of potential confusion might be… You will know where additional review is needed.
  • Emphasize the exam review. If one task takes priority on Monday, make it the preparation for the exam. Understandably, students are less patient learning about the nice-to-know stuff, the closer that it gets to an exam. They will value the time the most, if it is designed to help them perform better on the test and doesn't contain information that might be viewed as superfluous. This topic deserves longer than what I am giving it here, but I am stressing this point specifically because you are behind in your schedule and there's an upcoming larger-stakes assignment coming next. This would not be my general advice for how to teach a class all of the time.
  • Mix up the topics. Interleaving is shown to improve retention. Therefore, mix up the review to address content you have previously covered, as well as what you have not yet emphasized in person. I am assuming they have assigned reading, or other means for addressing the content outside of class time. This can provide them with a way to test themselves on how much they have understood and retained from their reading (or whatever else was assigned outside of class time).
  • Share the why. When we get rushed, we can forget to explain to students why we are approaching their learning in a particular way. Remember to explain about interleaving, for example, as a strategy that helps them retain the information better for the exam. Remind them about the importance of creating those neural connections in their brains, which is why we invest class time in retrieval practice.
  • Explain the test structure. You did not indicate whether or not this is their first exam. If it is, spend some time explaining the types of questions they can expect to see and why the exam is structured the way that it is… This is when I typically reemphasize the difference between memorization and being able apply the learning in a specific context.

I hope this is helpful to you, as you consider how to plan the time together on Monday.

I also suggest taking Teddy Svoronos' advice about journaling, as he shared about in Episode 168. Give some advice to your future self who might one day teach this course again about how to structure the time better in the various class sessions. This makes a big difference in not finding ourselves in the same situation next time.

Thank you for the kind words about the podcast, Michael, and for the encouragement.

-B