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What Homeschooling During COVID-19 Taught Me About My College Teaching

By Bonni Stachowiak | June 1, 2020 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

homeschooling graphic

This article is part of the EdSurge guide Sustaining Higher Education in the Coronavirus Crisis and is reposted here with permission.


While I have always wanted to be a parent, I've never wanted to homeschool my kids. At the university where I teach, a number of our students come from a homeschooling environment. This educational context, so different from my own growing up, has always intrigued me. As students would share their experiences, I often realized that the home schools in my imagination were vastly different from what these young people described.

My husband, Dave, and I have now been thrust into the role of teachers for our two kids—one in kindergarten and the other in second grade—for the past couple of months. Their actual teachers are amazing. They have been working incredibly hard to make the switch to an online environment. The best thing about the experience for us has been getting to overhear their teachers referring to our kids by name and addressing their unique challenges and passions.

What has been less fun has been trying to come up with a set of systems that work for us. As we near the end date of this school year, I have been reflecting on the lessons that these experiences can provide for how to improve my own teaching going forward.

Less Is More

I don’t like to admit this, but at first in the homeschooling experience, I was too concerned about what the kids’ teachers would think about us, as parents. I wanted to ensure that each of the boxes got checked on the kids’ schoolwork, including the optional ones for music, the library and social/emotional content. The pressure to perform to some imagined level concerned me on a daily basis.

Finally, I reached a place where there just wasn’t any room to reflect on this as much anymore. I’m on our university’s COVID-19 leadership team, which means I’m in daily meetings and making recommendations to the executive team regularly. This role also has me reading around 20 articles a day and attempting to synthesize what I learned in some meaningful way. Additionally, I am responsible for leading our faculty development team and teaching classes of my own. Increasingly, the pressures of my work overshadowed my desire to ‘perform’ as an excellent homeschooling teacher.

The kids’ teachers did a good job of telling us what assignments or activities were most important, from their perspective. There are a couple of apps that gear the lessons to the kids’ knowledge and skills and prescribe interactive content based on their performance. I eventually got to the point where I would prioritize those activities over others. And I grew to understand that If we didn’t get to everything, it wasn’t going to cause irreparable harm to the kids’ learning.

As soon as I changed my perspective on quality over quantity, everything shifted. If the kids asked if they could go outside, my answer was always yes. I would take a lawn chair out front and enjoy grading in the shade of one of our trees. The kids were always able to focus more once we returned inside for more of the formal learning. Every Thursday, we have decided as a family to do themed school days. Their most recent theme was Minecraft day. Dave, my husband, shared that when the kids asked if they could record a Minecraft podcast that morning, he quickly agreed, even though that wasn’t anywhere on the calendar. He said to me later, “I threw out the planned curriculum the moment I saw how excited they were to create something together.”

This less-is-more approach has been cascading into my teaching more in recent years. I taught a business ethics course this semester in which I had honed the learning outcomes down into the most essential ones. This meant that when the pandemic struck, the current events were able to flow much more regularly into our class discussions. I modified the final assignment to be a manifesto. The ways in which students synthesized their learning was phenomenal. Many of them mentioned feeling equipped to continue learning about what they had discovered in the class much more than in other courses they have taken.

One of the students who just wrapped up my business ethics class, Hannah Clark, really exemplified these opportunities for deeper learning. Hannah and I discovered our shared love for the television show The Good Place during the first week of class. Each time I would see her after our initial meeting, I would ask if she had seen the latest episode, and we would talk about our favorite plot developments and characters. In Hannah’s manifesto project, she shared about five people she learned about in class who influenced her. Number one on her list was Immanuel Kant, who showed up both in our class content and in The Good Place TV show. Hannah was able to take what she was learning in the class into her entertainment choices, her work and her life. She regularly shared memes with me during the semester that related to the topics from our class, as well as articles and even songs.

It’s Harder Than It Looks to Avoid Transactional Approaches

When it comes to homeschooling, our kids want more than anything else to play Minecraft, Mario Kart or to watch television. When they were at their normal school, “choice time” meant they could choose from a number of activities within their classrooms. Their options always seemed to fit into something school-related. At home, it translates one hundred percent of the time to “screen time.”

I find myself slipping into transactional thinking on a regular basis throughout the day. “Once you finish your 30-minutes of iReady Reading, then you can take a break for a bit.” “Watch the video from your teacher and then come back and show me what you practiced. Then you can do something else for a while.” My ultimate desire is for them to be enjoying learning for learning’s sake. We most often get there these days on things that have nothing to do with school.

Most of us who teach yearn to have students who engage in the class well beyond the point of earning grades and checking boxes. Proponents of the ungrading approach argue that they can get there much more effectively because they remove grades from the equation all together. Jesse Stommel, digital learning fellow and senior lecturer of Digital Studies at University of Mary Washington, shares his rationale for ungrading on his blog:

“In short, the act of grading does harm to students and causes teachers unnecessary stress. Research shows grades don’t help learning and actually distract from other feedback/assessment.”

Other proponents of ungrading are make a case that grades can be, in many ways, arbitrary. The cutoff between a B and a B-, for example, seems so subjective, they assert. In her book, The New Education, Cathy Davidson describes how people in the meatpacking industry found that letter grades didn’t even adequately satisfy their needs to differentiate one cut from another, let alone trying to have grades measure something as complex as humans’ learning. While I haven’t fully adopted an ungrading approach in my teaching, I do often create assignments in which students either met the criteria, or they didn’t (known as specifications grading). This approach tends to contribute to less transactional relationships between me and my students, though I know there is still room for me to grow in this area.

Structure Matters

The most frustrating part of homeschooling for me is how hard it is to organize everything. The teachers have done a good job sending PDF documents that lay out most of the kids’ school activities. However, each of the sites they are directed to navigate to have separate logins and passwords. Our firewall that is intended to protect against any of us inadvertently visiting inappropriate sites often generates false positives for the kids’ schoolwork. This translates to them not being able to view the web pages where assignments are stored.

The school my kids attend stresses the importance of the social-emotional growth, so it sets up one-on-one meetings between kids on a weekly basis. After some parents expressed concerns about their kids spending too much time on screens, the school added some screen-free exercises to its website, which parents can print out to let kids complete them by hand.

My husband and I both work remotely, and we trade off leading remote schooling and focusing on our own job duties. So we try to set up a schedule for the kids so that they can move through a few school tasks at a time without us needing to guide them. We do our best to schedule related tasks together in the hopes that they can move from one activity to the next without us always needing to stop what we are working on to guide them. Our attempts work less than 20 percent of the time.

That means that Dave and my professional work contains constant interruptions. At least we have each other working from home, which allows us to rotate homeschool teacher duty between each other. We keep trying to tweak what we are doing to provide for less of a need for radical context shifting. I also realize part of this is the very nature of six-year-olds and eight-year-olds. Try not to laugh at me too much here.

Reflecting on the challenges my kids face in their remote schooling, I realize the students in the university classes I teach face similar challenges. The learning management system (LMS) I use allows the instructor to see the course from a student’s view. And I used to spend a great deal of time considering how to set up pages, assignments and other content from within my course, only to discover that the vast majority of students never saw the fruits of my labor. Instead, they looked at the centralized due dates from all of their courses, consolidated on the main login page. They rarely clicked sequentially through the items the way I had constructed them. I found it was more helpful to think about the cadence of due dates and breaking larger assignments into smaller tasks whenever possible.

I have also learned to think carefully about how I label each assignment in the LMS. The goal is to indicate whether what I am posting is something they should take a look at, or something that requires some kind of action on their part. I use names like: “SUBMIT: Paper” and “READ: Chapter 4,” in an attempt to make it was clear as possible what is required.

My goal is to have as much contained within the LMS as possible, too. Most LMSs can be set up to integrate with external tools, making it easy to make use of preferred educational technologies without students having to remember another login and learn an entirely different system. Quizlet, a tool for creating digital flashcards, is an example of an external tool that is also available within our LMS. Students never have to leave the LMS to review the flashcards for our class, or to play the associated review games.

Minecraft shirts - brother and sister

I mentioned our kids’ love of Minecraft and how that’s often the reward at the end of their time spent on schoolwork. This week, on the themed Minecraft day, our son decided to loan his sister a Minecraft shirt so she could better celebrate the day with him. They read Minecraft books and played a Minecraft tag game outside. When it came time to do his assigned poetry lesson, he decided to write it on—you guessed it—Minecraft. I share his poem, below, with his permission.

Minecraft day
At school
I loan
My sister
Creeper
Shirt
For Minecraft day
The best
Day.

It has been quite an experience navigating homeschooling along with helping our entire university transition to remote teaching. It has caused me to reflect on much about teaching and learning these past few months. I have felt like a failure some of the time. In other cases, I have been elated at catching glimpses of the power of learning—and its messiness.

Filed Under: Teaching

Three Things I’m Curious About

By Bonni Stachowiak | February 23, 2020 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Cat looking into a window

I recently picked up Josh Eyler’s How Humans Learn, again, to prepare for a talk I gave this past week at Tarleton State University for their Center for Instructional Innovation. It did not disappoint. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I highly suggest you pick up a copy. Also, my thanks goes out to all the people I met at Tarleton State University this week. The stories you shared about how Teaching in Higher Ed has impacted your teaching were edifying to me and I'm honored to have had the opportunity to come to visit and share about curiosity with you in person at the conference. 

With curiosity on my mind in recent weeks, I decided to blog about things that have come up that sparked my interest and made me want to learn more. Below, you will hear about a new feature in Canva that I am enjoying experimenting with… You will also discover the ways I am pursuing habits more than goals these days. Finally, I will share about my exploration of Notion – a website that seeks to be an all-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, calendars, and more.

Incorporating Background Video in a Slide Deck

The theme of the talk was on curiosity and I found this short video clip of a cat looking around in a slightly inquisitive way to use as one of the slides. Canva must have recently added stock video to their service, which got me to thinking about how to experiment with it for this talk. I like that the cat isn’t doing anything too dramatic, or I think it could be too much of a drag on people’s cognitive load.

Then, I realized that it probably wasn’t going to work for me, since I would likely be working from Glisser and the video looked like it was only playable if I presented the slide deck from within Canva. That’s when things got truly exciting.

Cat looking curious

I discovered that there’s a way to export the video as a .mp4 (video file), which I will be able to add to YouTube, in order to have it play within Glisser. It says that it is still in beta, but it worked perfectly for me when I tried it.

Habits vs Goals

Many of the productivity experts I follow have been asserting that habits are far greater than goals. Episode 90 of the Focused podcast, for example, was titled Habits > Goals and looked at how establishing habits can help us achieve our goals better than just having identified them and trying to take individual steps toward them.

I continue to love the Full Focus Planner from Michael Hyatt. It has a section dedicated to two types of goals. Achievement goals are the kinds we are used to hearing about. Write a book. Hire a new faculty member. Finish a promotion and tenure portfolio.

Habit goals are less-often discussed. I already had an achievement goal that I keep track of on Goodreads. I was able to read 24 books during 2019, but in the end, it was unclear to me if I was actually going to be able to achieve the goal. I barely made it. However, for 2020, I have emphasized a habit goal related to reading and am going to fly past that 24 books count by the end of March, it’s looking like…

Goodreads reading challenge

The habit I am emphasizing is taking my Kindle to bed to do my nightly reading, instead of using the iPad. My goal is to do that at least four nights per week. However, it has been so enjoyable that I find I am practicing the new habit a lot more often than that.

The app I’m using to track the habits I have established for 2020 is called Streaks. It automatically tracks my goal of closing my rings on my Apple Watch. It is also able to track a four-day-a-week goal, like my Kindle vs iPad one. And a whole bunch of other types of habit goals.

Two books related to this curiosity of mine that I purchased but haven’t quite started reading are:

  • Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
  • Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones, by James Clear

I know that many of you who are reading these words have read them, as they come highly recommended. I am looking forward to discovering even further how habits can help me achieve my goals. I am also prepared to learn a thing or two about the importance of rest and how to get more of it in my life. 

Notion

Finally, I have been playing around with Notion quite a bit. The first time I was able to use Notion was when I copied Mike Caufield’s Check, Please! Starter Course over to my new Notion account. In case you’re interested in his course, too, here’s a description of it:

“In this course, we show you how to fact and source-check in five easy lessons, taking about 30 minutes apiece. The entire online curriculum is two and a half to three hours and is suitable homework for the first week of a college-level module on disinformation or online information literacy, or the first few weeks of a course if assigned with other discipline-focused homework.”

Mike Caulfield made it such that people can copy it over to our own Notion accounts and customize it to meet our individual needs. He just asks that any instances of it link back to his original course, so people are able to find their way back to where it all started.

Notion screenshot sample

The more I kept hearing people talk about Notion, the more I thought it might be a good idea to check it out for myself. I started to put some workflows up there to teach people how to edit stuff on my departmental website. It is really easy to learn and can be used in a myriad of ways.

Here’s an example from Thomas Frank on YouTube how he uses Notion to track all of the production steps for his online videos. And below are a few more Notion resources:

  • 23 Notion Tips, Hacks & Tricks
  • Top 15 Notion Tips for Beginners
  • A Beginner’s Guide to Notion

Dave and I are starting to talk about putting the workflows for our respective podcasts on Notion and seeing what else it can do for us.

Your Turn

What has ignited your curiosity in recent weeks?

Filed Under: Resources

How to Keep Class Sessions from Running Short (Or Going Too Long)

By Bonni Stachowiak | February 17, 2020 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Person looking at Apple Watch display

This article on How to Keep Class Sessions from Running Short (Or Going Too Long) was originally posted on the EdSurge website and is reposted here with permission. It is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. You can pose a question for a future column here.


Dear Bonni,

How can I design my class sessions to fit the available time? I never see this discussed in resources for effective teaching, but it has been a big challenge for me for many years. I'm always concerned about having too much or too little material.

With any interactive or active form of learning, so much of how a class goes depends on the students. So it's not like presenting a speech where you are in complete control of the time. Any error causes problems that ripple through the semester, especially when I'm teaching multiple sections that need to stay in sync. And any change in the course coverage or how I construct the classes makes prior years' experience largely irrelevant.

—Kevin Werbach, professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania


The fears about not having enough material to fill a class, or in getting behind with what you planned, are common. Peter Newbury, director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at University of British Columbia Okanagan, recalls such a time for him.

“A memorable teaching experience for me was the day I ‘lost control.’ The students were so engaged in discussions, I had no authority. It was awkward. And awesome. In hindsight, I created a safe environment, posed good questions, and gave them agency. I prepared to do nothing.”

Below are five approaches to use regarding the time-based aspects of class planning. I recommend making use of a timer, having an established end in mind for each class session, erring on the side of student engagement versus “covering the material,” having plans for extending the learning if activities are shorter than planned and leaving room for metacognition, meaning, leave time to talk about the learning process.

Begin with the End in Mind

Before we get to the details about what will be explored in a given class session, it is time to stay broad. The leadership author and speaker Stephen R. Covey always stressed the importance of beginning with the end in mind. In his case, his advice helps us to formulate personal mission and vision statements. In the case of teaching, the axiom helps us to be intentional about the most important things learners will walk away with as a class finishes.

In the book What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain describes how sustaining students’ attention helps to facilitate learning. He describes how a longitudinal study explored the ways in which expert teachers keep their focus narrow. Bain writes, “Teachers succeed in grabbing students’ attention by beginning a lecture with a provocative question or problem that raises issues in ways that students had never thought about before, or by using stimulating case studies or goal-based scenarios.”

In an hour-long class, I seek a way to gain the students’ attention in the beginning. Can I make them laugh? Feel some other kind of emotion? Draw them into a mystery we will be unraveling for the rest of the class?

When we begin with the end in mind in our teaching, our class planning becomes more flexible. We have a core question to explore, or a goal to pursue. The emphasis becomes on putting on different lenses in viewing the same set of ideas. What does this concept look like in different contexts? Where might there be confusion on the students’ part?

Use a Timer

There are many good reasons to use a timer while teaching, and one is simply maintaining awareness. When I am teaching a class for the first couple of times, I print out a copy of my slide deck with nine slides per page. I write on the printout how much time I plan to take for each section of content and for each interactive exercise. Then, I set a timer on my Apple Watch, which gives me nudges throughout the class to keep me on track of when I need to be moving on.

Of course, an Apple Watch is not required for this purpose. There are plenty of smartphone apps that work just fine. Microsoft PowerPoint has a timer built into the presenter’s view. There are also physical time clocks that some faculty like to have separate and apart from their computer setup.

Another reason to keep a timer handy during class is to facilitate exercises with students. I sometimes use a timer that has numbers large enough for students to see. I give them periodic reminders regarding how much time is left in the exercise and visit with those groups that have finished early. I ask them if they had any surprises as they went through the exercises, and how confident they are in their answers.

Err on the Side of Engagement

Whenever I hear faculty say, “I am just having so much trouble covering all of the material in this class,” I know that it is quite likely that they are spending an overabundance of time strictly lecturing and not enough time assessing the students’ understanding and retention of the learning.

In an hour-long class, I seek a way to gain the students’ attention in the beginning. Can I make them laugh? Feel some other kind of emotion? Draw them into a mystery we will be unraveling for the rest of the class?

Then, I often do something to get them talking and potentially moving around the class. Sticky notes are a favorite way of mine to accomplish both of these aims at once. I describe more ways of using sticky notes in teaching over on my blog, if you’re interested. I then might lecture for around 15 to 20 minutes. But throughout that time, I am asking the students for examples and posing other questions to them about how what we are talking about fits with prior learning from past weeks. The last third of the class is spent getting students talking with each other, reinforcing what they’ve learned, and seeing where there might be misunderstandings.

One resource I have found particularly useful in dissecting the questions around what topics need to be covered comes from Maria Anderson, CEO and Cofounder of Coursetune. She has proposed what she calls a learning lens for the digital age: ESIL. As we work through examining our goals for a given course, we can ask ourselves how deep the students’ learning needs to be around a given concept. Do they just need to know that it exists (E)? Or should they be able to perform a given task or provide an answer with some support (S)? Perhaps the learners need to be able to demonstrate something independently (I), or even have a deeper understanding of the concept that will persist for a lifetime (L). The ESIL lens can be useful when thinking through how much time to spend on each part of a class session.

Determine a Way to Extend the Learning

Even if we are making use of active-learning approaches, the interactive exercises we plan can take less time than we planned. Judith Dutill, a communication educator and instructional designer, recalls a time when a lesson she had planned about words and meaning went far faster than she had anticipated. She had brought in words from different decades and had the students match the word to the decade of the dictionary entry.

“We flew through it,” Dutill admits. She then had them get into groups and asked them to create a list of dictionary entries that could be added. In her case, she did this exercise more on an impromptu basis. However, now she has it to use the next time she teaches the class, if the same thing happens.

When I am teaching foundational courses with terms that are likely new to students, I tend to make use of Quizlet, a flashcards app. Quizlet has a test feature that generates a collection of matching, true/false, and fill in the blank questions. I will often have print outs of a couple of the tests from Quizlet, for when a quick opportunity for review emerges. I also highly recommend the Quizlet Live feature, which I have written about previously on my blog. I have only played Quizlet Live games with groups of up to 40. However, the makers of Quizlet say that they have seen it played with groups as big as 150 people.

Leave Time for Metacognition

Instead of just covering material, we need to get our students to be thinking about their learning. Metacognition is thinking about our thinking. As we have our students engage in metacognition, they are more readily able to take what they have learned and apply it in different contexts. As a result, they are able to determine their strengths and weaknesses and use strategies to figure out how to adapt their learning strategies accordingly.

Having students share the muddiest, or most confusing, point at the end of a class is an opportunity for metacognition. So is having students keep reflective journals to gauge their own learning.

The author of Creating Wicked Students, Paul Hanstedt, reminds us of the importance of structuring opportunities for reflection and metacognition. He suggests that we ask our students what seems most important to them from what was addressed in class. Among the specific prompts Hanstedt proposes: “What did you struggle with and why? How does this connect to X, Y, or Z? How would you explain this to someone not in this field?”

I recently taught my first class of the semester. It was a three-hour class, which gave me plenty of time to work through a number of interactive exercises to grow the students’ curiosity. The good news is that the students were far more vocal than I am accustomed to having undergraduates be that early in the semester. I did an exercise with sticky notes and then picked a couple of students to go stand next to each sign and recap the themes that emerged. It all went well.

However, I ran out of time to do the case study I had planned. Since I am not teaching multiple sections of the class, it easy to decide to let the class out about 15 minutes early, leaving time for a handful of the students to stay back to share some connection they had made during our time together.

One of them mentioned growing up in the same town I did – and noting how much that place reminds him of his grandmother, who has since passed away. Another mentioned his love of podcasts and asked if I had any other recommendations for him, beyond the ones I mentioned in class. I asked another young woman to stay after a bit, so I could thank her for the contributions she made during class and saying how much I was looking forward to getting to know her this semester.

If I had been teaching a class session that was closer to an hour in length, it would have been more important to use a timer and to keep things more structured during the interactive exercises.

We want to be able to leave enough room in our teaching for what might emerge, but without leaving behind the essential opportunities for our students to practice what they are learning.

Photo: Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Filed Under: Teaching

Why I Broke My Self-Imposed Open-Textbook Writing Ban

By Bonni Stachowiak | February 7, 2020 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

stack of books

I told Dave that I was done with open textbooks. Well, at least the part of my experience with them that means I work with a group of 15-20 educational leadership doctoral students to write one in an eight week period.

When Robin DeRosa had been on Teaching in Higher Ed (episode 183), she shared about her student’s open textbook. Not to diminish the tremendous effort that it takes her to continue the work on it, but they build upon past students’ contributions over time. They haven’t written a new book each time.

I have been completely unsuccessful at convincing any of the cohorts I have worked with to go about revising and adding to the prior cohort’s books. Each group had a vision for something completely different. When I left our house to teach that Saturday morning, I mentioned to Dave that things were going to be different this term. Well, they are now definitely different.

Just not in the ways that I expected.

Cohort 11 is writing a book during our eight-week class. Tessa had a fantastic idea to take the features that you would typically find in an instapot and to create a book of essays that illustrated leadership lessons using those functions. For example, the instapot has a pressure cooker setting. Most of us have had to lead under pressure and could easily write 40 essays on the topic without running out of ideas.

The book will have leadership essays in it that all have some kind of an instapot reference. The conclusion of each chapter will contain a recap entitled: Leadership Recipe, along with an instapot recipe.

My Instapot Recipes on Pinterest

Two of the project leads from prior cohorts came on Teaching in Higher Ed (episode 225) to share about their experiences writing a book with their colleagues. Our conversation reveals some of the challenges we experienced. Yet, they each said they would do it all over again, given the choice. They also mentioned some of the digital tools that we used in creating the books.

Google docs

Google Team Drives

Pressbooks

Zoom

Canva

Why did I decide to go against my self-imposed prohibition against writing a book in eight weeks?

There are two reasons, really. First, Tessa’s vision for the book was compelling. She was ready to dive in and the rest of the cohort was, as well. Second, I removed another major assignment in the class that I predicted would enable us to have adequate time to see their ideas become reality.Book cover: Nourishing leadership

I am continually reminded of how less can be so much more in teaching. The learning deepens when we stop trying to cram so much into our classes.

We had our second synchronous video conference session the other evening. The group has been collaborating using Google docs and some members of the cohort were confused how to find things and also how to provide and receive feedback on their writing.

Immediately, Robert started reorganizing the documents so they were easier to find. We could all see him doing it via Zoom as he revamped everything. Tessa brought up Google drive and showed people how to create a new document, upload a document, and to make suggested edits.

I had removed a major assignment, which freed up the time to really dive even more into the book project. The students shared how their confidence was building using the tools they are using for their personal knowledge management (PLT) systems.

There has been plenty of time for self-directed and cohort-directed learning to occur. I made some book cover ideas in Canva and some of the people on the session got to experiment a bit with using Canva. Robert found some recipe card graphics and showed everyone how they could be placed in PowerPoint. He showed how to add text boxes over the top of where the recipe instructions and ingredients would go. The rest of the cohort was passionate about which recipe card design to select and how to display them within the book.

I enjoyed seeing what a high-performing team Cohort 11 is… At one point, Annette asked Silvia if she wanted to chime in. Silvia had been awfully quiet and Annette wanted to be sure everything was ok. It turned out that her screen name in Zoom had been inadvertently set to “user”. She had been chatting things up in the chatbox, but none of us realized that she was the face behind the person named “user”.

It was apparent, too, that they haven't allowed themselves to fall into bad habits of always going with the first idea that someone mentions. Teresa is adept at sharing her perspectives, even if they are different from what others have had to share. They all use humor well and collaborate tremendously well together.

You may not decide to write a book during one of your classes and I totally understand that sentiment. However, let me challenge you to take a different lesson away from this post. Take a look at your classes and find ways to do less. You may just find there's a whole lot more learning waiting on the other side. And some delectable recipes, too.

 

Filed Under: Teaching

Let’s Take This Show on the Road: All the Way to Digital Pedagogy Lab 2020

By Bonni Stachowiak | February 1, 2020 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Aerial photo of Denver, Colorado

For the first time in Teaching in Higher Ed history, we are taking the show on the road.

We have been invited to partner with Digital Pedagogy Lab at their new location in Denver, Colorado. Many of this year’s 2020 Lab faculty have also been guests on Teaching in Higher Ed.

That includes people like:

  • Robin DeRosa
  • Amy Collier
  • Bonnie Stewart
  • Kevin Gannon
  • Kris Shaffer

There are also plenty of individuals who have long been on my list of people I would love to interview for the podcast. What a tremendous opportunity to get to connect with individuals who have shaped my teaching in such powerful ways for all these years.

Digital Pedagogy Lab 2020 Graphic

Sean Michael Morris explains the formation of our partnership as follows:

“Because Digital Pedagogy Lab offers courses and conversations about similar topics and as the Lab has also featured many of the same speakers as Teaching in Higher Ed–we feel this partnership is a perfect fit, and will give Lab participants even more to enjoy.”

We will also be providing a lens into the event for those who are unable to attend in person. I am going to be experimenting a bit with audio storytelling and attempting to capture a less linear version of the DPL conversations than how the podcast interviews are typically structured. I also plan on holding more traditional conversations with some of the teachers and fellows.

Finally, I am very excited to announce that will be broadcasting Teaching in Higher Ed live from Digital Pedagogy Lab on July 28, 2020 at 4:30pm Mountain / 6:30pm Eastern. More information on the broadcast, once we have figured out what we are doing.

View Time/Date on World Time Buddy – and add to your calendar

Note: Anyone who is reading this with advice on what tools to use for live podcast recordings is encouraged to share your recommendations with us. We would appreciate your guidance, especially on the recording a podcast live part of this adventure.

As Sean Michael Morris shared on the DPL website:

“We believe this is an exciting partnership for everyone who attends or has wanted to attend Digital Pedagogy Lab. Stay tuned for more information about Teaching in Higher Ed at DPL 2020.”

We hope to see some of you in person at Digital Pedagogy Lab 2020.

And by we, I do mean we. Dave and the kids will be there with me. Since this is the first time I'm attempting to do something like this, it will be nice to have some backup. The kids' podcasting skills aren't quite matched with Dave's, but no doubt they will keep us entertained.

Photo cred:  Cassie Gallegos on Unsplash

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