Teaching in Higher Ed

Teaching

Five Teaching Lessons from Bobby McFerrin

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Bobby McFerrin Teaching Lessons

Ever since I saw this video of Bobby McFerrin teaching about the pentatonic scale, I've been captured by all that it tells us about teaching.

Start Small

Bobby McFerrin stands up and walks to the front of the stage. His voice erupts with the first note, as he hops in the air, beginning to model for his students what he is inviting them to do. It is both simple and captivating.

Be Welcoming

He doesn't tell anyone to put their cell phones away, or read off of a syllabus. He doesn't say, “I'm going to teach you about the pentatonic scale, which first was performed by musicians back in…” No, he welcomes us to join him in experiencing the pentatonic scale, before we ever hear any of the particulars about it.

Leverage the Unexpected

The clip embedded above is only three minutes of what appears to be your typical panel. Five men sitting in chairs. When you're on a panel, you're supposed to sit, wait your turn to be asked a question and address it in the same way as everyone else.

Bobby McFerrin jumps up out of his chair, in what seems to be a response to a question about setting expectations (maybe?). Rather than talk about that, he demonstrates how expectations get set. He creates a sense of the unexpected and we begin to wonder what will come next.

Test Your Learners

He doesn't take the lead role throughout the demonstration. Instead, once he shows a bit of the patterns, he lets the audience move out ahead of his singing and show their learning as they go. He fluctuates between two notes in the scale and then lets the audience predict what will be the next note in the progression.

In part of his teaching, he is doing a version of retrieval practice (having the students recall what he has shown them so far). He also does what James Lang describes in his book, Small Teaching, as prediction. Lang streses that “making predictions about material that you wish to learn increases your ability to understand that material and retrieve it later.”

Allow for Improvisation

Our classrooms can be far too predictable. We do our students a disservice, by not preparing them for the complexity they will encounter as soon as they leave our white boards and our bulleted PowerPoints.

Watch this wonderful illustration of what's possible when we allow for improvisation.

What else did you see being illustrated about teaching from these Bobby McFerrin clips?

A taste of agency

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A taste of agency

I didn't formally know what agency was when I started teaching, yet somehow found ways to foster it in some aspects of my pedagogy. I also failed at it in other ways.

In my first couple of years teaching Introduction to Business, I let students choose from a set of “development opportunities” to learn more about business and demonstrate learning. More recently, I have been teaching a business ethics course using what I've informally started referring to on this blog as ‘Choose Your Own Adventure Assessment.'  There's a podcast episode about this approach, in addition to a two-part blog post (part 1, part 2).

Agency isn't only about giving learners choice, but that is the aspect that I'm touching on with this post. If you want more of a holistic appreciation for what is involved with agency, look no further than Larry Ferlazzo's site. While his resources speak to high school teachers, there is much to glean from his student agency collection for higher education. There's also a wonderful description of how agency fits in with critical digital pedagogy from Jesse Stommel.

First impressions

When students walk into a class of mine on the first day, I like to set the stage that something is going to be different about this class. I have historically found it harder to do an effective job at that with online classes (or, the online portion of a hybrid course), because I think I have valued consistency over the power of the unexpected.

Our university is switching learning management systems (LMSs) this summer: from Moodle to Canvas. The change has challenged me to rethink my course design. As I've learned more about Canvas and started to experiment a bit, I have found a way to create a way of giving choice to learners from the very beginning of the online portion of the class.

Choose your movie trailer

I've written before about being inspired to make a movie trailer for my classes. I finally took action and wound up creating two different course trailers. I circulated them on the Teaching in Higher Ed Slack channel and among some friends at work, asking which one people preferred.

One person suggested, “Give them a choice. Let them watch the one they would rather watch, or let them see both.” And so…

Workflow

Students taking my Introduction to Business course will now start with an instruction to click on whatever tv show / movie they would rather watch. Below is just a screenshot of what they will see and isn't formatted to work on this particular blog post. 

1-choose-your-movie

Trailers

Then, if students choose one of the more action-oriented options, they will be shown this page, on which they can view the action-themed trailer.

2-action-adventure

Those who watched the action-themed trailer can then either watch the romantic comedy-themed trailer, or return back to the getting started section of the course.

Of course, the same approach happens if students choose a romantic comedy genre of entertainment. They get a similar-but-different movie trailer.

You can click on the graphics of each of the trailers (action and romantic) and see the videos that my students will see, if you're interested. 

3-romantic-comedy

Next steps

The next logical step after this might be to have students create their own course trailers to demonstrate what they learned by taking the class. Then, I could use some of those in future courses and have an even bigger collection of potential trailers for the students to navigate to…

What are some small steps you take in the beginning of your online courses to give students agency?

Tools for better presentations

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Tools for better presentations

My imagination has been captured for what's possible through presentations, after attending the Podcast Movement Conference in Chicago last week.

The conference brought together such masterful storytellers as Glynn Washington, Alex Blumberg, and Anna Sale. There were a few other presenters who showed themselves to be more adept at podcasting than they were with an in-person audience.

Better presentations

The whole experience got me thinking about what approaches may be used to help create better presentations. Here are a few that I have found particularly helpful:

Make your slides interactive

One of the biggest flaws I noticed in a few of the presentations at the conference was the excessive use of the “raise your hand if you _____” technique. You can get away with that once, maybe twice. But, I counted over 20 uses of it in one presentation and that's over the top.

You can engage using audience response systems, most of which are available for use on mobile phones these days. Google slides recently was updated to include ways for audiences to engage with their phones and Educational Technology and Mobile Learning has this tutorial to get you started.

I use PollEverywhere and Sli.do currently. I am intrigued, though, by the way that Google is integrating the interaction within their service, vs having to embed outside services the way that it is when you use the other two services.

Know the difference between slides and handouts

Whenever I'm asked to provide my slides in advance of a talk, I usually start politely asking questions about the reason for the request. Often, the person asking wants to make photocopies of the slides for the attendees, since people are used to slides being really just the presenter's notes, which are shown on the screen during their talk.

What they are really asking for is a handout, a tool that can be used as reference after the presentation with additional ways to reinforce the learning from the session. Mark Hofer wrote about the importance of using slides for their intended purpose and creating handouts, when necessary, on the Luminaris blog.

Sometimes, the presentation part of the entire picture isn't even necessary. Check out this gorgeous example of how much can be communicated within a slide program from Nancy Duarte. She refers to this method of communicating via this medium as Slidedocs.

Communicate visually

Slides aren't designed to be handouts. They also weren't intended to display your notes on the projector screen for everyone to see.

There's a place for you to type notes that you want to see on the computer you're using to present on, but it reduces your learners' cognitive load if you use a relevant image to convey your idea, instead of a bunch of bullets that you'll attempt to “talk over.”

Better yet, with some practice and guidance on how to approach it, you can learn to present without any notes at all. That way, the focus can be on your message, and not on you losing credibility by needing to be lost in your notes throughout your presentation.

This design guide from Canva has bunch of phenomenal examples of visual slides throughout the article. Even if you don't have time to read all of their advice, just flip through some of the slide decks and prepare to be inspired.

HaikuDeck is a great place to get started creating visual slides, if you don't have as much experience at it. The way their service is designed is to “force” you into not putting too much on a slide.

Here's an example of HaikuDeck in action. I never actually got to give this presentation, since it was planned at our faculty gathering last year and I got super sick on the day I was supposed to give the talk.


USING TECHNOLOGY TO BE – Created with Haiku Deck

Resources

My presentation approaches have been profoundly shaped by two resources:

You can see some of their influences in this slide deck I designed for the Lilly Conference earlier this year.

What resources have you found particularly helpful in your ability to create better presentations?

Creating memories as teaching

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Creating memories through teaching

I had the honor of interviewing Gardner Campbell this week: twice. The first episode with him airs on June 30, while the second one posts on July 28.

[Spoiler alert] One of the things he spoke about during the recommendations segment was his recent purchase of the quadrophonic albums of the group, Chicago.

Ever since our conversation, I've had Chicago playing almost non-stop in the soundtrack in my head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxarwzuFEug

Chicago always reminds me of my Dad and the many trips my family would take out to Joshua Tree when I was little. It was touching for me to discover that Gardner and I share such a deep connection with the music of Chicago.

Music almost always evokes deep memories for me. When students recommend music to me, the memory of them introducing me to a phenomenal musician or musical group is forever etched in my mind.

Before streaming music services existed, my students used to be amazed that I had over 10,000 songs in my digital music collection. I've always enjoyed playing music before class and often invited students to take the role as DJ to find songs that they liked to play.

My favorite memory of those early days of teaching was the student who asked if he could find a song from my collection to play and came up with this little number:

To be clear, this was not done in any sort of flirtatious way, but rather as an attempt to embarrass me for owning the song. I think it was also a “test” to see what kind of professor I was going to be, since it was early in the semester.

I must have passed the test, since this took place ten years ago and I'm still in touch with about half of the students who were in the class.

Creating memories as teaching

I promise not to give the entire episode #107 with Gardner away in this post, but he also shares about listening to Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill with his study abroad students and the lasting memory that it is for him of his teaching experiences.

While any study abroad experience is going to be an extreme example, I keep reflecting on the aspect of our role as teachers of creating memories.

I teach a sales and sales management course once per year that I've taught for 11 years now. I've stayed in touch better with the students who have taken that class more than any other that I teach. I also hear from more of them, years later, as they share some way that the course is still having an impact on them.

I attribute much of that to the way that the students take risks in the course and are able to demonstrate their skills in a powerful (public) way at the end of the semester.

The final experience of the course is called Sales Challenge #3 (as in there are a couple of lessor challenges that come before it, to build up their skills and help prepare them for the experience.

Sales challenge 3

The students dress in professional attire and role play a sales scenario with a business professional they have never met before. It is typically a nerve-wracking experience for them. However, even years later, they tell me what an impact it had on their confidence that they now have the skills needed to influence others and help people solve business-related problems.

We create a memory together, through the experience. It is one that lasts for years down the line and helps them reflect even further on the skills that began to develop, during their college years.

How do you see creating memories as an aspect of your teaching?

The four agreements of teaching

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the four agreements of teaching

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to talk with Doug McKee and Edward O'Neil on episode #32 of their TeachBetter podcast.

The designated topic was teaching freshmen, but we discussed everything from Baskin Robbin's taster spoons, to retrieval practice, to memory palaces, to Evernote, to metacognition. In the episode notes, they also included a link to Vanderbilt's Center for Teaching‘s Teaching First Year Students guide, which is well worth a look.

As I have reflected more about our conversation and what I would want to tell people who are teaching first year (or, really any year) students, I see strong parallels with the principles illustrated in the book The Four Agreements () and teaching well.

The four agreements

Below are the agreements as articulated by don Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements, along with a few thoughts about how each one relates to our teaching:

Be impeccable with your word

Stephen Covey defined trust as consisting of both character and competence ().

We can show students our character by providing meaningful and moral feedback. We can have kindness at the core of our teaching. Our exam grading practices can also exhibit fairness and integrity.

We can maintain our competence by having a robust personal knowledge management system and by building effective habits. Ultimately, we want to use the strength of our words to show respect for our students and to demonstrate our own commitment to lifelong learning.

Don't take anything personally

For a long time, this was the only agreement I could recall from the book, because I wrestled with it so often. And that was even before I became a college professor.

“Nothing others do is because of you” (). In the past, when I discovered that students had shown a lack of academic integrity, I thought it was a direct affront to me. Now, I have come to realize that I'm really not anywhere near as much of the center of my students' universes as I once had believed.

James Lang's Cheating Lessons () really helped me depersonalize plagiarism and academic cheating. On episode #19, he stated, “You’re the last thing on their mind. When a student is cheating… their cheating isn’t an assault on your and your values” ().

Don't make assumptions

As I shared in the Engaging Difficult Students episode, I have shown a great ability to completely misread students. It is so easy for us to ascribe intent in situations and establish fertile ground for power struggles, instead of for learning.

We can observe a student on his/her cell phone and immediately assume that they must be attending to something nowhere near as important as whatever it is that we are doing/saying. We forget that his sister may be in labor, her Mom may have had her car break down on the side of a busy freeway, or no one ever really attended to him well when he was younger, so he has nothing to emulate in social or learning contexts.

Mahan Khalsa () describes what he calls “yellow lights” in selling, but I see them as coming up regularly in my teaching and relationships with students. He says that yellow lights are “signals the client may buy something that won't give them the results they want or expect; that they may not buy at all; or that may not buy from us,” but those signals may be that a student is being disrespectful and not buying in to what you were hoping for in the learning environment are also a form of yellow lights.

Khalsa's three steps for responding to yellow lights also apply to a broader context:

  1. Slow down – don't increase the potential for conflict by becoming aggressive. Instead, remind yourself that there's a lot you don't know here and maintain your composure.
  2. State it – name whatever you is that you observe, without anger or defensiveness.
  3. Hand the “yellow light” to the client – ask them how to handle the situation and let them turn the light red or green/

Always do your best

The hard part about always doing our best, is that our roles are so often in conflict with one another. Those of us who are teaching are also pursuing some next step in our educational journey. Some of us are parents. We may be struggling to balance research, teaching, and university service. We may be struggling with our health, or with the health of someone we love.

Or some of us may just consider ourselves bad female academics.

Teaching is incredibly hard. Yet, I imagine even harder still, when done without a care or concern about doing it well.

References

[reminder]Which of the four agreements resonates with you the most in your pursuit of teaching well?[/reminder]