Teaching

I tried doing poster sessions for the first time a year ago. Doug McKee had inspired me, though he was skeptical that my analog approach would be successful.

This semester, I decided to experiment more with poster sessions in my consumer behavior classes, with a few key differences:

• Larger/outdoor venue: I was teaching two sections of the course and needed to find a venue to fit 50+ students, along with business professionals, students, alumni, faculty, and staff. We settled on an outdoor courtyard, with accommodated us well.
• External audience: Inspired by public sphere pedagogy, I wanted to invite business professionals, professors, and alumni to attend.
• Live event streaming: We experimented with Facebook Live, in an attempt to capture an even larger, external audience.
• Give-aways and food: We decided to involve our guests and invited them to vote for their favorite posters with tickets. I had contemplated using some kind of technology (a colleague had used Mentimeter in the past to vote on student films), but in the end, we went low-tech and did a raffle. I like that everyone had a chance to win and the way the tickets re-engaged the guests with the people at the various booths, as they went back to award their favorite posters, by handing them tickets.
• Professional photography: We were fortunate to have Taylor Gonzalez from TayJoy Photography in the class, so we could have all these wonderful photographs from the event.

I am thankful to have had a wonderful teaching assistant this semester, Jamie Jacob, who was instrumental in getting business professionals to attend and in locating some prizes for the raffle.

Emma McKay was our event planner and kept us on track with all the tasks that needed doing to make the event a success.

Emma's LinkedIn profile says that she's an aspiring event planner, but I think it is more than safe to change that wording to present tense at this point. Read Emma's reflections on the poster sessions event on LinkedIn.

One of the students in the course who was scheduled to be a Facebook Live co-host came down with something awful right at the last minute. While it was disappointing to not have Adam Tyler there at the event, it is fun to get to share his reflections on the event with you now.

Consumer Behavior Poster Sessions, by Adam Tyler

The Consumer Behavior Class at Vanguard University, taught by the o-so-talented Dr. Bonni Stachowiak, put on an incredible poster session event Wednesday, April 19th. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend this event due to a horrid stomach flu that had me bed ridden for four days.

However, thanks to the incredible innovation of Facebook live, I was able to go back and watch all of the posters and the interviews that went along with them. Cathryn Lynch did an incredible job recording and interviewing, and now I will talk about some of the posters that stood out to me the most.

Consumers at Disneyland

The Disneyland poster was the first one of the night. It was very organized neat, colorful, and the Disneyland sign across the top represented exactly what the sign looks like at the Park. The Disneyland poster caught my attention just like they try to to do to you in the park with the sights, smells and sounds. Cathryn asked the question of how would a consumer misbehave at Disney, and the answer was that a lot of pass-holders let their friends borrow their pass and they dress to look just like them.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

The entire baseball poster, representing the Los Angeles Dodgers, was made to look like a large baseball field. It was neat, organized, and definitely sporty. Misbehavior at a baseball game could include fans being rowdy, drunk, and loud. For promotions at baseball games, teams give out give-aways such as selfie sticks, towels, etc to attract fans. Baseball does a great job of advertising as well.

M&M Consumption

The M&M poster consisted of a large blowup of the main M&M characters as the background. The poster also included the stat that 100 million are eaten every day! They use the significance norm to describe the importance of M&M’s to consumers.

NCAA March Madness

This poster was done to simplicity as it was just black and blue, but had a lot of great information on it as well as a visual of a mini basketball hoop. The influences at a NCAA basketball game includes situational factors and hereditary influences.

Changes in Music Consumption

The music poster was set up very organized, colorful, and attractive. Some main points included how popular music streaming has become with Apple music, Amazon music, Pandora, etc. A misbehavior of music would be illegally downloading music or sharing passwords and services.

Super Bowl

The Super Bowl Poster was very green, big and eye catching. Some main points of this poster included how everything during the Super Bowl is amped up to a whole new levels including the game, advertisements and food. Marketing is so important to consumers and they fall completely in the trap during the Super Bowl. A misbehavior of Super Bowl could be the inappropriate commercials or ones that do not support fair trade.

Consuming Movies

The movie poster looked as if someone was actually going to the movies. It was dark and black with few lighting around the outside. People go to the movies for hedonic value. Friends, family and peers also have influence on what movies people see. A situational influence could be the smell of popcorn in the theatre or the advertisements of coke.

Social Media Poster

The social media poster had a black background with colorful writings and designs. Social Media has so much power over everything, especially marketing. Instagram uses its platform for celebrity marketing, and Facebook uses all kinds of marketing to pull the consumer right in. Social Media knows how to market to your area, what you like, and what you might buy. It’s a great business!

American Spending on Dogs

This poster was bright and white, and consisted of pictures of dogs and bones throughout the poster. Americans spend the most money on their dog of anyone. Americans are in the need for companionship, and there is no better answer than a dog. They are cute, cuddly, and Americans want to make their pet as happy as possible, which means spending money. Dog supplies are not cheap either!

Consumer Health Trends

The consumer health board was light, trendy and eye catching and almost looked as if I was dieting by staring at the poster. Some trends today include vegan, vegetarian, non-gmo, gluten free, paleo diet and more. A lot of eating trends that people develop are from celebrities, and people abuse this trend by developing eating disorders and anorexia.

Tailgating Poster

The tailgating crew had on music, food, and a good time for anyone to stop by. The vast majority of Americans who go to football games tailgate. In fact, some only go to the games to experience tailgating. Tailgating includes buying food, grilling food, having drinks, and having games. Tailgating is very influential among the sports community.

Social Entrepreneurship Resonates with Consumers

This poster was very neat, clean and white! It consisted of a bunch of facts, charts, and socio-responsible companies. Some included 31 bits, Krochet Kids, Warby Parker, Toms, and more! Toms and Warby Parker are a glasses and shoe company and both donate pairs to charity for example. Consumers are always looking to give or in this case invest in products with a purpose.

Conclusion

The poster session event looked like such a big hit to the Vanguard Community. There was a good amount of people not even in the class who attended this event. Everyone was having fun enjoying each others posters and enjoying some good consumer information.

Once again, it was such a bummer that I could not attend this incredible event put on by Dr. Stachowiak, but thank you technology for allowing me to experience so many wonderful posters in the comfort of my bed.

My colleague and I presented at the Lilly Conference (Anaheim, California) this past week. Our talk was on Rethinking Assessment for Agency and Relevance.

We also got to attend others' sessions and have the experience of learning from such tremendous educators from across the country. Unfortunately, California did not deliver much, in terms of the weather…

But, the Lilly Conference certainly delivered.

Five Forms of Becoming a Teacher

Stephen Brookfield gave a talk at the end of the second day of the conference, which he entitled Five Forms of Becoming a Teacher. You can download his text-heavy PowerPoint slides from the workshop materials of his website (under PowerPoint Presentations).

I say that they're text-heavy in the sense that you can probably capture at least some portion of his talk by reading the slides. He framed everything around the principle that no matter how long any of us has been doing this teaching thing, we are still in the process of becoming…

It's hard to wrap my mind around the idea that someone who has written as many books as he has about teaching and who is the definition of expert educator, would still consider himself still becoming…

It was edifying to hear him express this in such a deep, profound way. I've been at this for 13 years and still feel like one who is becoming in each of the areas he discussed.

The five domains that Steve identifies as his areas of becoming are: pedagogically, ontologically, politically, emotionally, and racially.

Racially Becoming

The six bullets that Steve included on the slide related to becoming racially are heavy. I've had a chance to speak with him twice for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, plus some conversations before and after those interviews. In particular, we've talked about how we carry our whiteness into diverse classrooms.

Moving beyond the ‘good white person' who is unproblematically an ‘ally' – Stephen Brookfield

I've felt this temptation many times in my teaching. When a student has said something racist in one of my classes, I've observed myself try to hurry the conversation along and try to protect the students of color from what just happened.

Like they don't experience things like that all the time. Like they couldn't speak their own truth, without me having to protect them from someone else's supremacy.

I'm becoming a teacher who thinks less like a ‘good white person' who protects and more like one who has the courage to trust that heated conversations have the potential to ignite changes in perspectives.

Willingness to sit with anger – Stephen Brookfield

Thankfully, I've become far more comfortable sitting with others' anger. However, that seems to sometimes only extend to solo conversations. It is difficult for me to facilitate a group of others who are not equipped to receive others' anger.

So often, conversations about privilege translate into the privileged thinking that because they didn't set out to take others down, that somehow it means that they never could.

I'm becoming a teacher who facilitates hard conversations and helps students be prepared to sit with each others' anger.

Normalizing racism to move past shame and guilt – Stephen Brookfield

I wondered how others in the room during Steve's presentation (especially those who have experienced racism) might feel about the wording of this bullet (here I go, trying to protect others, again…).

What I understood Steve to be referring to was the need to be able to name racism when it occurs and to be able to then do something more powerful with that named action than just leave it at shame and guilt.

If we can name the racist behavior, then we can move toward changing the actions in the future. I'm still wresting with this idea and am not sure where I land. I both want to normalize it and not normalize it, all in the same moment.

I watched as our country normalized the telling of a story about sexual assault from a person who would eventually become the president of the United States. I see too many ‘all lives matter' memes, without any sort of cultural sanctions taking place.

I'm becoming a teacher who discerns how to name racism, without leaving others solely with shame and guilt. I'm becoming a teacher who normalizes the naming of, at the very least, racial microaggressions, to help change minds and actions in the future.

Becoming

I plan on doing some more writing about Steve's other areas of becoming that he spoke about at The Lilly Conference this past weekend. In the meantime, if any of what I've written resonates and you want to explore the topic of racially becoming a bit more, here are some resources.

Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast Episodes

• #142: The Danger of Silence with Clint Smith
• #123: Presumed Incompetent with Yolanda Niemann
• #079: Stereotype Threat with Robin Paige
• #102: Proactive Inclusivity with Carl Moore
• #124: Intercultural Learning with Maha Bali
• #119: Bridging the Culture Gap with Annemarie Perez
• #066: Making Challenging Subjects Fun with Ainissa Ramirez (first ten minutes or so of the episode is about those early influences that led her – as an African American girl – to first become interested in the field of science)

It's hard to write about becoming…. to admit that I'm nowhere done developing into the kind of teacher I yearn to be… Won't you join me in this hard conversation? In what ways are you becoming?

If you teach in higher ed, you have probably experienced it.

Despite your best efforts, your entire class seems to start experiencing a huge decline in motivation. What started out well, as you watched your students' curiosities be heightened, now feels like an attempt to lift something well beyond your capacity.

You're experiencing “the dip,” and it is a common occurrence.

You may very well not have done anything wrong, to cause this to happen. However, there are plenty of strategies you can use to bring the motivation back in a course.

1. Kevin Gannon provides resources about student motivation and learning
2. Doug McKee describes ways to engage a larger class
3. The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation provides this handout with some active learning strategies to try
4. Maha Bali reminds us that we can embrace a pedagogy of imperfection in our teaching
5. Heather Yamada-Hosley prescribes some self-care through a yoga routine for people who work on their feet (the more centered we are, the more we have to offer our students)
6. Sarah Rose Cavanagh asserts that “We don't need to coddle. But we do need to care.“
7. James Lang gives us small changes we can make in our teaching during the last five minutes of class, or the first five minutes of class

I recommend putting together a playlist of energizing music to start each class with, not taking yourself (or your class) too seriously, and just being thankful that things are probably going better for you than they are for this guy.

How do you try to address issues of low motivation, midway through your semester/term? 

I just finished listening to a Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode with Mike Caulfield on digital literacy that will air on Thursday, February 2.

Not to give too much away, but at the end of the conversation, we chat about the tooth fairy, and other childhood myths. I joke about how I have tended to stay away from controversial topics on the podcast, but that I couldn't resist sharing that my husband and I don't plan on telling our children that there is such a thing as the tooth fairy.

Since I have started down the path of breaking out of my “safe” topics pattern here on Teaching on Higher Ed, I thought I would share two myths about learning that are almost always cause for concern by people who have subscribed to them throughout their career as educators.

We all have one primary learning style that needs to be accommodated for in our learning

I bought into this myth for at least the first ten years of my corporate training career. Now, I'm confident that believing in this myth actually makes our teaching worse.

• All You Need to Know About the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth, in Two Minutes
• Letting Go of Learning Styles
• Stop propagating the learning styles myth
• One Reason the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth Persists
• The Myth of Learning Styles

One take-away from the research that debunks this myth is to have multiple approaches for helping learners comprehend what you're trying to teach, instead of gearing the students' experiences toward their preferred learning experience. Consider ways of making your teaching visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, using more than one approach at a time.

I once posted about the learning styles myth on my personal Facebook page, having no idea the topic is as controversial as it seems to be… Please refrain from thinking that showing this myth for what it is (unsubstantiated) does not mean that people don't have learning disabilities. That's an entirely different domain. Yes, dyslexia exists, for example… and there are ways in which we, as educators, should be accommodating for that disability.

If we have learners “practice by doing,” they will retain 75% of what they're “taught”

This learning pyramid has also been propagated across multiple educational contexts. It is meant to encourage us to move up as high as we can on the pyramid, lest we leave people only remembering 5% of what we said. This is not to say that there isn't ample research to illustrate the effectiveness of active learning pedagogical approaches, but doesn't the “tidiness” of these numbers make you a bit suspicious?

• Tales of the Undead…Learning Theories: The Learning Pyramid
• Why the ‘learning pyramid’ is wrong
• The diffusion of the learning pyramid myths in academia: an exploratory study
• Five common but inexcusable learning myths about how we learn

Active learning can help motivate students and help them retain more information. However, the process of learning (and teaching) is far more complex than a diagram like this could ever convey.

Your Turn

What teaching and learning myths have you observed that have persisted for too long now?