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Balancing Structure and Emergence in Teaching

By Bonni Stachowiak | January 5, 2025 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

A spiral structure that could be part of playground equipment or an outdoor modern art piece with clouds and blue sky in the background

Throughout my teaching career, I’ve often swung between two extremes when it comes to structure and flow. At times, I’ve been highly structured and organized—a good thing, but one that can become limiting when I miss what’s emerging in the moment. On the other end of the spectrum, if I lose track of the overall goals of a session or workshop, I risk not meeting my commitments or aligning with participants’ expectations. It also creates challenges for the broader structure of the course or event—whether it’s a class within a degree program or a workshop designed to support a university’s teaching and learning goals.

Mia Zamora discusses this tension on Episode 475 of Teaching in Higher Ed: Making Space for Emergence. In the interview, she describes how we can create “buckets” to hold topics that we can explore together, which is especially helpful for the kind of class content that will be responding to what's happening in an internal or external context, for example. In my business ethics class, we analyze news stories weekly, and there's a “bucket” where our reflections and analysis can be placed.

Alan Levine has co-taught with Mia previously and they both talk about courses having “spines” to keep the needed structure. You can see an example of their #NetNarratives class spine mid-way through Alan's blog post: My #NetNar Reflection. On Episode 218, Alan discusses the importance of giving people opportunities to explore, as part of their learning. He shares:

You get better by just practicing. Not rote practicing, but stuff where you’re free to explore.

Speaking of exploring… I just went to visit Alan's CogDogBlog – and discovered a recent post with “one more thing about podcasts” where he talks about a cool podcast directory that I wasn't aware of… and ways of sharing one's podcast feed with others. Now it is taking every ounce of discipline not to go down the rabbit trail of discovering more. But I leave for Louisiana in three days, the semester starts tomorrow, and I have a 5:30 AM keynote on Tuesday morning. All this to say, I had better behave myself and share a few more things about facilitiation I've been thinking about, as I prepare for those adventures.

Two Additional Approaches for Managing the Tension Between Structure and Flow

Over time, I’ve discovered two other helpful strategies for balancing structure and in-the-moment flexibility. These tools and insights have transformed how I prepare for and facilitate learning experiences.

1. SessionLab: Visualizing and Adjusting the Flow

A while back, I discovered a tool called SessionLab, and it’s become a game-changer, especially when preparing workshops. It helps me create a “run of show” document—something Kevin Kelly has discussed both on Episode 406: How to Create Flexibility for Students and Ourselves, as well as in his book on flexibility in teaching: Making College Courses Flexible Supporting Student Success Across Multiple Learning Modalities. A run of show outlines the timing, activity titles, descriptions, and any additional information for a session, helping me stay on track while leaving space for flexibility.

SessionLab allows me to break down a workshop or class into blocks of time and activities. Though it includes a library of standard activities, I mostly use it to map out my own. One of my favorite features is the ability to highlight sections in the “additional information” column. This has been a game-changer for virtual facilitation. For example, when sharing resources or instructions during a Zoom session, I pre-highlight key content so I can easily copy and paste it into the chat in real time.

Beyond that, the tool allows you to color-code blocks to visually assess the balance between different types of learning activities—like how much time you’re spending on lecture versus active learning. It even lets you generate a PDF version for offline reference.

This morning, I was preparing for Tuesday morning's keynote and realized (yet again) I’d tried to squeeze too much into my allotted time. SessionLab helped me get realistic about pacing, build in breathing room, and ensure space for those organic moments that make these moments of learning in community so powerful. After all, if everything were going to be rigidly planned, why not just record a video and skip live interaction altogether?

If you’re looking for a tool to help you balance structure with flexibility, I highly recommend giving SessionLab a try.

2. Padlet: Unlocking a Hidden Feature for Better Facilitation

The second resource I want to highlight is in an upcoming book by Tolu Noah on facilitation: Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education. I had the privilege of reading an advance copy, and it felt like every page introduced me to a new tool or a fresh way of thinking.

One of many insights that stood out was a feature I hadn’t realized existed in Padlet, a virtual corkboard I already use often for collaborative activities. Tolu explained that you can create breakout links to share just a single column from a Padlet board rather than the entire board.

This has been incredibly helpful for making my Padlet boards more user-friendly. Before, when I shared an entire board, participants sometimes found it visually overwhelming—unsure where to post their contributions. Now, if I’m running an activity with multiple columns (e.g., ideas related to sustainability in one, corporate social responsibility in another), I can send a direct link to the specific column where I want participants to share. It simplifies the process and improves clarity for everyone.

When Tolu Noah’s book comes out, I can’t recommend it enough—it’s packed with facilitation wisdom and practical strategies for creating more engaging learning environments.

Resources

Here’s a summary of the tools and people mentioned in this post:

  • Episode 475 with Mia Zamora
  • Episode 218 with Alan Levine
  • SessionLab – A tool for creating run-of-show plans, structuring workshops, and balancing structure with flexibility.
  • Kevin Kelly – Educator and author who explores flexibility in teaching and learning; referenced for his insights on “run of show” documents.
  • Making College Courses Flexible Supporting Student Success Across Multiple Learning Modalities – Kevin Kelly's book: “Addressing students’ increasing demand for flexibility in how they complete college courses, this book prepares practitioners to create equivalent learning experiences for students in the classroom and those learning from home, synchronously or asynchronously.”
  • Padlet – A virtual corkboard tool for collaborative activities, with a feature for sharing breakout links to individual columns.
  • Tolu Noah – Educator and author of a forthcoming book on facilitation, emphasizing practical strategies for inclusive teaching.
  • Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education – Tolu Noah's forthcoming book: “Workshops are one of the most frequently used forms of professional learning programming in higher education and beyond. However, in order for them to have a meaningful impact, they must be crafted with intentionality. Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality_ offers practical guidance, tools, and resources that can help you create more engaging, enriching, and effective workshops for adult learners.”

 

Filed Under: Resources

Lessons Learned from Intentional Teaching Podcast Episode About AI Across the Curriculum

By Bonni Stachowiak | December 4, 2024 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Podcast Inspiration: AI across the curriculum Background is blurry technology with a person standing looking out (we see the back of their head)

I drew much inspiration from this morning's listen to Derrick Bruff's interview with Jane Southworth about AI across the curriculum. Derrick Bruff's podcast, Intentional Teaching, gives us bountiful opportunities to learn from the experiences of educators who are transforming educational experiences for students across a wide variety of disciplines and contexts. While the episode did focus on what is obvious from the title, AI Across the Curriculum, I drew a lot of inspiration well beyond just that topic of AI. There are many layers of what they talked about that go well beyond the broad topic of artificial intelligence. Other aspects of leading and teaching within a university context are shared well beyond the particular initiative they discuss.

Jane talks about the difficulty of making such a massive change across a complex institution. She made a few jokes about the difficulties, although she said it was such lightheartedness that I felt such kindness toward her in what must have been such challenging endeavors. Consider what it takes to make something like this happen, and all the committee work that it takes, all the different people that are need to be talked to, all the perspectives to consider. The intricacies, not just to make something work, but to make the fruit of that work visible to students such that they enroll in the program and pursue the educational aims beyond the requirements for their majors. Jane shares examples of them starting an AI certificate program within their curriculum. The mammoth effort that it was to make that technically possible from an operations standpoint, such that someone could take the right classes and that they would go through all the curriculum committees and get that to work within their policies and procedures is one thing. But another layer I found quite fascinating was how do you then make that visible to students such that they're even aware that this certificate exists and that they find it of interest and worthwhile to pursue further learning.

As Sam Cooke sang years ago, I also “don't know much about geography.” There's no doubt in my mind that I have subscribed to some of the myths that Jane described about her discipline of geography. Jane described how in the United Kingdom, when she was in college, that it was the third or fourth most popular degree. Geography graduates found themselves receiving among the highest earnings as they left school, as well as being surprised when they discovered just how much more the field is than studying rocks, like they had initially believed.

In the show notes for the episode, Derek shares a couple of resources that come both from conversations with Jane, as well as from his ongoing collaborations with Flower Darby, co-author of Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes and The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. The first article linked by Derek in the show notes is Developing a Model for AI Across the Curriculum: Transforming the Higher Education Landscape via Innovation in AI Literacy by Southworth et al. The second article was Building an AI University: An Administrator's Guide by Joe Glover. I'm grateful, as always, to Derek and all of the opportunities he makes available to those of us interested in teaching with intention.

Resources

  • Intentional Teaching Episode AI Across the Curriculum with Jane Southworth on Spotify, Overcast, Apple Podcasts, or the web
  • Developing a model for AI Across the curriculum: Transforming the higher education landscape via innovation in AI literacy, by Southworth, et al
  • Building an AI University: An Administrator's Guide, by Joe Glover from the University of Florida

Filed Under: Resources

Ethan Mollick Shares Principles for Working with AI on Coaching for Leaders with Dave Stachowiak

By Bonni Stachowiak | April 1, 2024 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

"Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use." Ethan Mollick on Coaching for Leaders

I enjoyed listening to Coaching for Leaders episode 674: Principles for working with AI with Ethan Mollick this morning. Dave is traveling this week, but it was almost like he was here, keeping me company, as I listened to the interview. 😂

One key point from the conversation that really resonated with me was how quick and easy it is to assess the AI's output, it if is doing something that you're already good at. I have found many examples of that truth, in experimenting with various AI tools.

We use the CastMagic.io service for the first pass at our podcast transcripts, for example. It can identify key quotes from the interviews and recommend discussion questions. For me (or someone on our team) to carve out the time to listen to the entire episode and try to figure out which quotes might be good to share just isn't practical. Yet we can quickly look and discard what the tool identified as not particularly helpful in illuminating or amplifying the conversation.

In a recent workshop with faculty, they were surprised to learn how easy it is to set up a form for students to make a request for a letter of recommendation or reference for a job or for grad school. Then, an AI can take the first pass at writing a draft, based on your writing style and preferences for length, tone, etc. How much easier is it to correct it for what it got wrong about a particular student's recommendation vs starting from scratch?

I've been using an AI app called Whisper Memos, which is on both my iPhone and on my Apple Watch. When I get an idea or something I want to share with someone, I just tap the complication on my watch face and start talking. The key differentiator for Whisper Memos for me is that it automatically puts in carriage returns, making it that much faster for me to make edits later on.

Another thing I like is that I discovered my favorite “chicken scratch” notes app on my iPhone and Apple Watch, Drafts, has a special email address I can use to send text to it. So now I have Whisper Memos set up to send to my unique Drafts email address and all my thoughts wind up in one place, ready for me to process when I have time.

I encourage you to listen to episode 674 with Ethan Mollick on Coaching for Leaders with Dave Stachowiak. When you're done, check out the AI-related conversations that I've had for Teaching in Higher Ed.

How are you using AI in your work these days?

Filed Under: Resources

2021 Top Tools for Learning: My Vote

By Bonni Stachowiak | July 6, 2021 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Tools4Learning - Jane Hart's annual survey

I’m excited to participate this year, once again, in Jane Hart’s Top Tools 4 Learning. It is the 15th time she has conducted the survey. In more recent years, Jane asked us to separate our list of ten tools into the following three contexts:

  • Personal Learning
  • Workplace Learning
  • Education

She then lists the top 200 results across all of the categories, as well as listing a top 100 for each category.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t participate last year. But I do have blog posts for the following years:

  • 2019 Top Tools for Learning
  • 2018 Top Tools for Learning
  • 2017 Top Tools for Learning
  • 2016 Top Tools for Learning
  • 2015 Top Tools for Learning

As a person who enjoys it when I have a long streak of something going, I also want to be gentle with myself regarding what it has been like to attempt to keep even the simplest of things going during a pandemic. I avoid looking back at my own Top Tools for Learning prior posts, as well as Jane Hart’s listings, until after I have written the current year’s post. That way, I avoid biasing myself, given all the great tools there are to support our learning.

Top Ten Tools for Learning

Below, I present to you my 2021 list (which hopefully can make up for my lack of a list in 2020). In no particular order, the following are my Top Ten Tools for Learning:

Raindrop.io | Personal Learning | Digital bookmarking tool | Having the ability to save links and be able to easily resurface them later on is essential to my Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) system.

Overcast | Personal Learning | Podcast catcher | Despite not having as much time during the pandemic for podcast listening, I still treasure those episodes that I am able to consume. The reason I use Overcast is due to it’s smart speed function (set how fast you want to listen to particular podcasts and it keeps that setting saved) and the ability to share clips of episodes easily.

Twitter | Personal Learning | Microblogging + social media network | On Episode 53 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Peter Newbury explained his method for who to follow on Twitter in that he connects with people who are like him, along with people who are not like him. I have carried that advice with me since that conversation in 2015 and have benefitted richly from it.

Readwise | Personal Learning | Digital reading highlights manager | Have you ever gone to purchase a book, only to have the book seller’s website tell you that you had already bought it? Have you ever went to read a book, only to discover you read it years ago? Readwise helps resurface the highlights that you have saved from a number of digital sources. You can save highlights from Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Instapaper, PDF documents, Inoreader, Evernote, and a whole lot of other services. Their tagline explains the functionality well: “Readwise helps thousands of readers get the most out of their digital highlights.”

Inoreader | Personal Learning | RSS feed aggregator | Rather than trying to remember to visit every website that might have information that is relevant to me, I use RSS (real simple syndication) to subscribe to various feeds, so all the information comes into one place. Inoreader is an RSS aggregator (meaning it “collects” all the things I want to subscribe to and keeps track of what I have read and what remains unread). To read my RSS feeds, I prefer to use Unread. When reading RSS feeds using the Unread app on my iPad, I can browse articles and mark things as read using only my thumb.

Zoom | Education | Web conferencing | While there are other web conferencing tools that attempt to ‘catch up’ with Zoom on a sustained basis, I still have found no other tool that comes even close. Zoom is easy to get started with, handles lower bandwidth situations with ease, and continues to innovate without allowing their usability to diminish.

Canva | Workplace Learning | Graphic design creator | I have two different Canva Pro accounts (personal and work), because it has that much benefit. For each context, I can have our various logos, color scheme(s), and photos/graphics uploaded and saved.

Blubrry | Workplace Learning | Podcast hosting | If you want to have a podcast that goes out to be listed among the various platforms/services, you will need a podcast hosting company. Teaching in Higher Ed has been a part of my life since June of 2014 and has contributed more to my learning than any single other effort I’ve undertaken since then.

Google Jamboard | Education | Collaborative sticky notes and simple drawings/text | Whenever I’m with a group of people, I can invite them to “join” me on Google Jamboard to collaborate by adding sticky notes, text, and simple shapes to a shared canvas.

Loom | Education | Screencasting | I use Loom in my teaching, work, and personal lives multiple times a day. When I have a quick thing I want to “show” someone, I can record my screen quickly and copy a link to the resulting video with a single click. I can also include my web cam and do a video with something on my screen, or just the camera, alone.

 

Would you like to submit a vote with your Top Tools for Learning? You can fill out a form, write a blog post, or even share your picks on Twitter. The 2021 voting will continue through Thursday, August 26 and the results will be posted by Wednesday, September 1.

Filed Under: Resources

Most-Downloaded Teaching in Higher Ed Episodes in 2020

By Bonni Stachowiak | November 25, 2020 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

most downloaded episodes 2020

Terry Greene, host of the Gettin’ Air podcast, asked some of us on Twitter to guess what was the all-time most downloaded episode of his show. I thought perhaps the episode with Chris Gilliard or the one with Audrey Watters. Terry finally satisfied our curiosity by sharing that it was in fact John Stewart who held that honor.

Blog Post: Gettin’ Air Top Ten

In the tweet where I presented my guess, I mentioned that the time of the year when a Teaching in Higher Ed episode airs seems to contribute greatly to the total number of downloads that a given episode will receive. Yes, having recognizable names matters. But so does airing episodes at times when faculty are coming back from a break and are ready to dive back into ways to develop our teaching even further.

Terry’s post got me wondering about Teaching in Higher Ed’s most downloaded episodes. Around the million downloads mark, Dave and I switched podcast hosts (from Libsyn over to Blubrry), so it is just way to cumbersome to do analysis across the entire history of the show.

Before we moved podcast hosts in early 2019, episodes with the following people were always among the most downloaded:

  • Stephen Brookfield
  • James Lang
  • Cathy Davidson
  • Clint Smith
  • José Bowen
  • Ken Bain
  • Todd Zakrajsek
  • Sean Michael Morris
  • Betsy Barre
  • Jesse Stommel
  • Gardner Campbell
  • Sara Rose Cavanagh
  • Kevin Gannon

Speaking of downloads, I noticed the other day that Teaching in Higher Ed had crossed over another one-million downloads mark – meaning that the podcast has now been downloaded over two million times, in total.

It is staggering for me to think about all that has transpired since the first show back in June of 2014. I’m eternally grateful to all the people who have come on the show to share with the Teaching in Higher Ed community.

After reading Terry’s blog post about his downloads this morning, I thought I would take a look at Teaching in Higher Ed’s downloads (totals started being counted in February of 2019 since that’s the month when we switched hosting companies).

  1. Episode 263 with Elizabeth Barkley | Recipes for Effective Teaching
  2. Episode 258 with Sara Goldrick-Rab | Paying the Price
  3. Episode 254 with Jared Cooney Horvath | Stop Talking, Start Influencing
  4. Episode 256 with Paul Hanstedt | Creating Wicked Students
  5. Episode 309 with David Rhoads | Hyflex Learning
  6. Episode 324 with Dan Levy | Teaching Effectively with Zoom
  7. Episode 273 with Bonni Stachowiak | Engaging Learners in Large Classes
  8. Episode 253 with José Bowen | Spaces and Places (and Nudges)
  9. Episode 291 with Michelle Miller | Learning Myths and Realities
  10. Episode 271 with David Gooblar | The Missing Course
  11. Episode 269 with Jennifer Pusateri | Removing Learning Barriers with Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
  12. Episode 282 with Michael Wesch | Using Challenges to Motivate Learners
  13. Episode 252 with Maha Bali + Autumm Caines | Ownership, Equity, and Agency in Faculty Development
  14. Episode 277 with Derek Bruff | Intentional Tech
  15. Episode 320 with Jesse Stommel | How to Be Together in Learning
  16. Episode 295 with Travis N. Thurston | Online Engagement Through Digital PowerUps
  17. Episode 290 with Bonni Stachowiak | The Productive Online and Offline Professor
  18. Episode 272 with Viji Sathy + Kelly Hogan | Inclusified Teaching Evaluation
  19. Episode 259 with Natasha Jankowski | Intentional + Transparent Assessment
  20. Episode 279 with Brian Laduca | Applied Creativity for Transformation

It is always somewhat hard for me to make a list like this because there are so many incredible episodes that wind up being missed. But it is also fun at the same time to reflect on what I learned from these conversations. Thanks, Terry, for giving me the inspiration to go through this exercise today.

Filed Under: Resources

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