Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 479 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Lessons in Life and Retrieval Practice with Dr. Pooja Agarwal. Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. I am so glad today to be welcoming back to the show Dr. Pooja K. Agarwal. She’s a cognitive scientist conducting research on how students learn since 2005. She’s the author of the book Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning, and an assistant professor of psychology at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, teaching psychological science to exceptional undergraduate musicians. Dr. Agarwal is also the founder of retrievalpractice.org, a source of research-based teaching strategies for more than 15,000 teachers around the world. Dr. Agarwal’s research has been published in teaching peer reviewed academic journals, featured in The New York Times, NPR, Scientific American, and Education Week, recognized by the National Science Foundation and highlighted in numerous books, podcasts, and videos. Dr. Agarwal received her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. Her love of learning formed at the outset of her career as a fourth and fifth grade teacher in St. Louis, Missouri. Pooja Agarwal, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Pooja Agarwal [00:02:00]:

Thank you so much. I’m so excited to catch up with you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:02]:

I am excited to catch up with you as well as you are probably fairly familiar with. I dave been opening the show with this phrase about teaching being both an art and a science. And you and I have known each other well enough for us to know we agree on that. There’s a lot of things that we don’t know about teaching and learning, and especially there’s so much variance depending on the context. And what I love about your work and your research and the researchers that you spotlight is that you do consider different kinds of contexts in the way that research may inform that. And I just have to share really quickly, erin Whittake, who is a friend and she’s been on the podcast before, I saw her on social media recently with a mug that someone had bought for her as a gift that said, Context matters. So I know we both are on the same page teaching as an art and a science, teaching and learning really matters what context it is that we’re talking about. But I’m excited to just maybe review for some listeners or maybe for the first time tell us a little bit about something we do know about as researchers, and that is retrieval practice.

Pooja Agarwal [00:03:11]:

I’m so glad that you mentioned the context and how it ties into the art and the science. What we know about the science of learning is that learning depends on the context. So I am going to Japan this summer and I want to learn a little bit of Japanese, which is very different from me reading a book and trying to remember what I read in the book. I just finished lessons in chemistry this morning and I want to learn and remember something about that book. So the context matters and it matters for both the art and the science when it comes to retrieval practice, what you mentioned, to back up a little bit. 100 years of research demonstrates the power of learning and the simplicity of learning, and we can break it down in a very simple way into three stages of learning. The first stage we call encoding, when we get information into our heads so I am reading a book or the listeners are listening to this podcast, they are getting information into their heads. That first stage of encoding. The second stage, we hope that stuff gets stored or it sticks, right? As teachers, we teach lessons to our students. We might lecture, we might have asynchronous videos. That’s that first stage of encoding. The second stage of storage, we want that information to get stored in our minds. And the third stage is what we call retrieval. That’s when we want students to retrieve what they learned. What did you learn throughout the semester? What did you learn in class last week? As teachers, as students, as adults, when we think about learning, we typically focus on getting information into our heads. We focus on that encoding stage. And this 100 years of research demonstrates that the magic of learning happens at the third stage, that retrieval stage. When we pull that information out and we use it, that isn’t just for assessment, that isn’t just to see what we’ve learned. It actually shapes and changes and solidifies what we learn. So my area of research really focuses on that third stage of retrieval practice, mentally, time traveling, to think back about the books we read, the podcasts we listened to, the instruments we’ve been practice, the languages we’re learning all different contexts. And that retrieval practice, practicing what we know, solidifies that learning in a way that we don’t typically focus on.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:05:44]:

It’s funny that you say that, because I met someone years ago at a conference and he was so kind and gracious and saying how impressed that he was with me in terms of what I can remember about the podcast. He said he wished that he had the network of information in his brain the way that I did. And as you were sharing that, I sort of chuckled to myself because a lot of it does come from one of my favorite quotes about teaching and learning in general from Robert Bjork forgetting is the friend of learning. And sometimes why I may seem to some people as impressive is because I have forgotten things. And just the other day I was thinking, oh my gosh, it would be so great to have this person on the podcast, and I go and look up and find out, oh, you already had her on the podcast. It’s just been so long. So when we don’t have that, it’s been that long, and I haven’t had any need to do that. I mean, that was a mini failure because it wasn’t public until I decided to make it public right now. But I’m not sharing her name, so I don’t have to insult her or whatever. But that neural connection that had, for whatever reason, gotten disconnected, I’m sure I’m not describing it in the most sophisticated way possible, but it just got a little failure, and it just got reconnected.

Pooja Agarwal [00:06:59]:

But that’s the thing. I would not call that a failure. That’s not a failure at all. That’s part of learning. And one thing I do with my students is I normalize forgetting. We beat ourselves up so much when we forget someone’s name, when we forget what we did last weekend, when we forget an important life event. And that’s not a failure because then when we retrieve it, it actually gets strengthened in a way. It’s kind of that AHA effect, like, oh, yeah, I did have that person on my podcast. Oh, yeah, that is how you say the word for thank you in Japanese. So it’s not a failure at all. And I think we as teachers need to really embrace and normalize for students we’re going to forget. And that’s part of learning.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:43]:

Yes. So we’re going to have you describe retrieval practice just to solidify it a little bit more in our minds in two very extreme ways. First, I’m going to ask you to explain it to an eight year old, and then I’m going to ask you to explain it to an 80 year old. So let’s start with the eight year old. How would you explain it to an eight year old?

Pooja Agarwal [00:08:03]:

Well, I love starting with examples. So for both an eight year old and an 80 year old, I like starting with an example. I just had my niece and nephew visit me in Boston, so we actually did a lot of retrieval practice. The first day they visited, we went to a children’s museum. The second day, we went to the aquarium. A third day, we went to a Red Sox game. And at the end of their trip, I asked them, what was the favorite part of your trip to Boston? And my nephew said it was visiting this hidden gem in Boston I love called The Mapparium. And he was able to articulate as a seven year old, as an eight year old. Here’s the cool thing about the Mapparium. I loved walking inside of a globe, and that’s retrieval practice. Simply asking a kid, asking my nephew, what was your favorite part of the trip? Is an example. And then I could point out to him, actually, when you just told me that was your favorite thing about your trip, that’s something you’re going to remember even better because you talked to me about it, because you shared that and that’s retrieval practice.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:13]:

Yeah. As opposed to, of course, you just talking to him about, isn’t it great that we saw these things?

Pooja Agarwal [00:09:17]:

Exactly. Yeah. I could review that information for him. That’s the encoding. Or I could just ask him, what did you learn today? Which actually, I think, feels a little pressured, as opposed to, what was your favorite thing? What did you do today? What was something cool you did yesterday? Is a really great question for kids to ask as well.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:38]:

All right, so what about the 80 year old? Are there any other things that you might bring up for them that might be unique to their context? I realize, of course, 80 year olds are very different from each other, but any sorts of additional ways that you might consider explaining it to them.

Pooja Agarwal [00:09:52]:

For 80 year olds, we often think about memory failures of sorts, forgetting, tripping over our words. One thing we do as we age is we reminisce. We think about life events, what we call autobiographical memory, like writing your own autobiography. It’s remembering your own life events. So if I were to ask an 80 year old, what’s something you remember when you were in your 30s? What’s a really cool birthday that you had? And for an 80 year old to share that. I love stories. I love stories like that from people who have had such a rich life history that asking them what was a cool birthday you had that stands out to you, and then having that conversation is an example of retrieval practice to solidify that memory for an 80 year old. So we do a lot of that oral history with older adults that I think is just so important because we just love thinking and remembering about those life events and that’s retrieval practice in an eight year old sort of worldview and context.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:06]:

I love getting to catch up with you today. It has been a while, as we say, and we’ve had some really major events around the world that have happened since the last time we have had a chance to talk. So I will ask you an unfairly broad question, but what comes to mind for you as you consider how the literature, the research on retrieval practice has changed or not, given what we have individually and collectively gone through these past few years?

Pooja Agarwal [00:11:37]:

Wow. In terms of everything that’s happened in the past few years, two aspects of the science of learning and memory come to mind, one from an educational standpoint and one from a more personal standpoint. The first is just how we are teaching. Of course, all of us were on Zoom for a year, year and a half, two years, maybe even longer. I transitioned to Zoom as well. And thinking about learning in that context was a big shift for us and our students. It felt, I think, at the beginning especially, that we had to do a lot more lecturing on Zoom and then eventually realized, oh, that is not working. That’s actually focusing on that first stage of encoding. How can we use online tools to get to that third stage of retrieval? So I, for example, in the past few years have transitioned all of my retrieval activities to Google Forms, or at least my Asynchronous retrieval activities I used to do in class mini quizzes that I now do on Google Forms, which has worked out great. And I think for a lot of us as educators, we’ve found tech tools that really help support learning that we are now continuing to incorporate even as we are in person now. So one tech tool I absolutely love, I’ve used for years and years is called Flip that I think we have talked about on Teaching in Higher Ed as well. In the past few years, we’ve thought about teaching and learning and we’ve shifted that to an online space, and I love seeing how we’ve shifted that but continued using those strategies in an in person context. In terms of the past few years on sort of a personal realm of learning, one thing I’ve really enjoyed talking with my students about is what we call college memory. There’s research me and my colleagues have published on collective memory, which is how social groups remember big events. A simple example is how people from the United States remember September 11 compared to how people outside of the United States might remember September 11, or how older adults remember the events of World War II different from how younger adults have learned about World War II. And we are all forming collective memories of the Pandemic, what that looks like for professors versus students, what our collective memories are of that time period, what that looks like for essential workers and nonessential workers, what our collective memories are for the Pandemic, for parents versus non parents, and the science of learning around collective memories. I’m so excited to see what that research is going to look like down the road, because that research used to rely a lot on wars and natural disasters, for example. And now for the world to experience the Pandemic but from a lot of different lenses, I think is going to have some impact on the field of learning and memory research

Bonni Stachowiak [00:14:44]:

That is so intriguing to me. Again, so good to catch up with you today and hear more about what you’ve been up to. I’m intrigued because I feel like some of the conversations you’re having and the research you’re doing might weave into or at least touch over an area of research about stated preferences versus actual use of things. I’ve been really intrigued by some of the research that Robert Talbert has done and I’ll have to go back and find his article. But even just something as simple as how did people anticipate that they would use the videos and other assets associated with a class and then how they actually use them. And I always want to be careful whenever I talk about this with colleagues because I want to point out that that is real. Our stated preferences get so often, so different. I mean, I get really intrigued by things. In fact, I had a friend, Rob Parke, come on the show and he talked about this class that he teaches at USC about how to build smart gadgets, smart devices and things like that. And so I ended up buying the kit that the students buy and I had all the thing and then I get in there and I’m like, yeah, this seemed like a good idea. And I love his work and I’m so intrigued, but I just think that you had a little bit too high of expectations form how much time something like this would take. I mean, really to go back and take a college level class. My stated preferences were different, actually had the capacity to do so. I don’t know if that strikes anything for you in terms of thinking through this research about our memories, because when we talk about our memories from what my novice understanding can actually change how we remember things as individuals, let alone how that might affect a group.

Pooja Agarwal [00:16:34]:

Right. And our expectations and preferences, our motivations, shape so much of our decisions and our learning. To go back to your point about how context matters in the context of a classroom, I have expectations for what I want to teach and how I want my students to remember it. And my students have expectations and motivations they’re really going to study in a more effective way based on the signs of learning and then that might not happen. We default to our old habits. To me, maybe kind of like a science kit, it’s having the expectation that I’m going to exercise five days a week and it turns out that’s never going to happen. Right. So when it comes to using the science of learning, one of the biggest tips I like to share is to just be practical and realistic when it comes to incorporating the science of learning. I have lots of strategies on my website, retrievalpractice.org, and in my book, Powerful Teaching. And all of the strategies I share are small, simple lifts. And I love, of course, James changes, like James Lang’s books Small Teaching. That’s precisely the point. These are small strategies you can use without this expectation of, I’m going to get this science kit and I’m going to take this college class and I’m going to build it and I’m going to rock it. It’s more like just ask your students what they remember from class yesterday instead of telling them what you covered in class yesterday.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:01]:

Yeah, and what I appreciate about that example you just gave us, we can sometimes do this synchronously. You also talked about doing similar things asynchronously I think I used to perhaps be more idealistic about, oh, yes, we’re going to just set these systems up and the people will just do them because they’re good for us. Like for me, eating vegetables, that’s good for you. And so if I just had a fridge full of vegetables, then I’m just magically, somehow going to that’s where we bring in your advice to us. And I’m thinking also of Michelle Miller has given this advice in her work as well, a little bit of points. And in fact, James Lang, when he talks about how he changed Small Teaching Edition One to addition Two, was not as high of an emphasis toward intrinsic motivation, maybe at the expense of the extrinsic of, yeah, throw a few points, someone’s way is actually going to matter for their learning. We do like to check those boxes. We do like to get those points. And as icky as that feels to me to even say that it’s just, realistically speaking, helping to instill, taking advantage of extrinsic while still wanting to embed those things around intrinsic. You’ve been talking about that, of course, without us explicitly saying this, but that is about the context and helping people be able to draw what they’re learning from the class and apply it in meaningful and significant ways in their own lives. So it’s kind of a mix of both of those things. And that’s an art and science in and of itself because it’s different for every person in every class.

Pooja Agarwal [00:19:37]:

Yes, absolutely. For us as teachers, we can motivate what our students do in the classroom by our point structures, by in class retrieval activities, we can’t control what our students do outside the classroom based on how we structure our classes. I have mini quizzes every week instead of students cramming for midterm and a final. But what my students do at home, I can’t control. So at least from a research perspective, as a scientist, I do try to give students access to some small tips. So for those interested, I have blogs, podcasts, video recommendations for students@retrievalpractice.org. Students. My colleagues, the learning scientists are publishing a new book called as that test specifically for college students on the science of learning. Again, I’ve got more books on my website, but I’m very excited about The Learning Scientist new book, as that test as small, Simple Strategies Students Can Use. Even knowing that we may be idealistic about our teaching and learning sometimes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:44]:

Would you describe a bit more about the Asynchronous activities that you have them do in Google Forms? I’m specifically curious if there are advantages that you think of of doing that type of work outside of the learning management system instead of or in addition to the quizzing mechanisms that most LMSs have for us today within them.

Pooja Agarwal [00:21:04]:

Yes, well, part of that, I should say, is that I teach at the Berklee College of music in Boston. I’m not a musician, I’m a scientist. So I get to teach science to musicians. And our LMS has been Google for a long time. We are transitioning to canvas this fall. So I, Dave, used Google Forms as a sort of workaround, and I’m excited to look at how to embed them and how to use that with Canvas starting this fall. So Google forms I do like because I can create conditionals. For example, some of my students, even within one class, I have students reading a mix of different books. So I can ask a student, which of these four books are you reading? And on Google Forms, then I can take them to sort of a separate page with questions about their book. And of course, on Google Form, I can embed YouTube videos, I can send them links, and I really like having that flexibility. I also give them feedback through the Google Forms. Once they hit submit, they can see my comments on the short answer questions. So my mini quizzes are on Google Forms. Of course, there’s concerns about Chat, GPT and using artificial intelligence for Asynchronous work. One way I try to get around that, that I’ve really revised my Google Form mini quizzes is to ask, give me an example of XYZ specifically related to your ear training class, or give me an example of this concept we talked about related to your use of pro tool software when you are songwriting. And in that way, hopefully, it’s a little clearer to me whether students are coming up with genuine examples from their own lives. I have also started asking questions like, what was it that you remember about this concept when we talked about the serial position effect in class? And they could look up what the serial position effect is. They could ask chat GPT. Give me an example of that. But for me to say what really resonated with you about our discussion, that’s harder for students to use tools like Chat get on a Google Form. So those are some examples of the Asynchronous work. Another asynchronous tool I use is flip. So I ask students to complete this online task, video game kind of thing to test their memory. Tell us on Flip how you did, or you’re reading this scientific article. Tell us a criticism you have about that scientific article. So I like using Flip as an asynchronous tool. I used it pre pandemic. I used it during the pandemic. I continue to use it in person as a great way to facilitate class community and retrieval practice. Students are still discussing what they learned on Flip.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:23:52]:

I think so much of this too is the way that you carry yourself as a teacher and the kindness that you bring. But it’s kindness mixed also with challenge. But the challenge is, this is good for you, and I’m here to support you and support us as a learning community into things that we know works. And so I’m imagining in your Google form, were I to be a student and you say, what do I remember about it? Were I to say, gosh, I can’t really recall anything, that maybe you’re not going to be super punitive and be like, how dare you. I asked you a question. What do you remember? And if I happen to have had a bad day that day and I don’t remember anything, not as the very sophisticated expression goes, not jacking me around, getting so just like, did you answer the question? Yes. And these are exercises that help build those neural connections for you. And being transparent with that, I think, goes such a long way. I was going to mention one thing. I’m so glad that I asked you about the Google forms because that’s the kind of thing that I was mentioning. Rob Parke, who’s been on the podcast and talked about his class from USC, the other thing he talked about, you might want to go back to the show notes for that one Pooja is he talked about he builds all of his class materials, all his exercises, his lecture notes, everything is outside the learning management system. It’s a GitHub repository, but he does it through some type of a text editor. So how easy is that to not have to go back into it? And then no matter where we’re living, whatever learning management system, the learning management is just pointing over to this repository that’s easier to update and navigate through. I’m again glad I asked because I’m like, oh, just another example of when we’re using learning management systems for what they are good at. And there are some things that it does work better and it depends on the class and the learning management system and all these things. But then to have these other things, I don’t believe that most of the learning management systems have those kinds of conditionals. And I can tell you who tries to embed the embedding is I love it when it works. But there parke some instances where a particular context within the LMS, it just doesn’t work as well as if it was an external tool.

Pooja Agarwal [00:26:14]:

One thing I did as sort of using the LMS for what it’s good for, like attendance and grading. One thing I tried this past spring with, thanks to my partner who had this idea, was I have my syllabus as a Google Doc. I send it out at the beginning of the semester and like a typical syllabus, I have a calendar of readings and assignments on the Google Doc and then on the LMS I would copy and paste, here are the pages, here’s a link to my Google form. And I realized, well, I could just put those links on the syllabus. So instead of students having to open up the LMS at all, other than to check their grades and to get feedback, they have to go to my syllabus every week. Even if they scroll down to the bottom, to the calendar, at least I know they know how to access the syllabus. And I just link to things in the little grid matrix for their weekly quizzes, for their readings, for any additional assignments. And so I really don’t have to go to the LMS other than grading and attendance, because that just works better for me and my students. Now, again, I’m excited about our integration and transition in canvas, but I would recommend thinking about using a syllabus in Google Docs and then just putting all the links just it makes so much more sense for me and my students.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:36]:

I love this so much. I love geeking out about conversations like learn so much. And some of that learning comes from the practical how to, but a lot of it comes from just expanding my imagination. And I recently co authored a chapter and have been doing some other collaboration with Mahat Bali, and she taught me it’s one of those things where I didn’t think to look for this, but that I just discovered that through her that in Google Docs you can do what are called anchor links. And so in Pooja’s case, if she was talking about wanting to link to the reading, she doesn’t have to only link to the Google Doc. If she wanted to, she could link to basically scrolling down as far in that syllabus as to get precisely to the readings. And those kinds of links can be really powerful for just getting people right to the know, making it really convenient, like you said. But you do want them to get back there. You’re just making it that much easier. So I don’t know if you’ve tried that, but that was my little recent discovery I got all excited about. Yeah, before Pooja and I get to the recommendations segment, I just wanted to take a moment to thank today’s sponsor, and that is Text Expander. Text Expander is the longest running sponsor on the podcast and is a real partner for me and for us. It’s one of the first things I install on any new computer because what it does is allows me to save time with typing, which seems really kind of a simple thing. Maybe. But I do like the idea of saving time so I can free it up to do better things than repetitive tasks that are kind of meaningless. So everything from providing standard text, such as a show notes document, by the way, that I fill in information, it’s really easy to set up that kind of information. Or it could be something just as simple as a link. I did some collaborative writing recently, and we wrote using Google Docs, and so I had a Text Expander snippet that when I just typed in a few characters into my web browser. In this case, it would expand into the links and take me. Immediately to where I wanted to go. And we just recently started experimenting with Text Expander for teams at my university in our division. And that’s been really powerful just to get a lot of our standardized language for things and it makes it really easy to continuously improve them as we find better ways of communicating information. We’re responsible, for example, for when new faculty come on board, getting them some of the essential information that they need to help them be successful and thrive at our university and just having everything in one place. And if we want to change the wording or maybe there’s a new link or a new resource, it’s really easy to do that and everything lives in one place for us to access. So I’m very thankful to text expander for sponsoring. If you head over to textexpander.com Slash podcast, you can find out more about Text Expander and how it helps you with repetitive typing, little mistakes that you might make, or the time we spend searching for answers and how that can take away from time versus text. Expander expanding these little snippets of text from single lines to whole paragraphs anywhere it is that we might type. Head over to textexpander.com slash podcast to find out more. And also a special discount for Teaching in Higher Ed listeners. All right, well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations and I want to recommend something broadly, but a specific one, and that is that Tresse McMillan Cottom. She writes a newsletter for the New York Times and it’s just so exquisitely good. And I actually think I’ve recommended a piece before, so I’m only recommending this one piece so I can recommend other ones. In the future, I’m going to read just a few snippets from it and encourage people to take a look. It is behind a paywall, but it’s good enough that I just want to share bits of it here. So the title of this newsletter is when life threatens to become smaller, this is what I do. And she talks about she gave a commencement speech at the University of Michigan School of Education and she stood on stage with my own job to do to tell students they will have many forms of employment in their lifetimes. Some will be good, some of them will be bad. But in this life, it’s important to be clear that there is a difference between your job and your life’s work. The sooner you figure that of, the better off you will be. And she talks about writing a job description for herself once a year and how meaningful that exercise is to her and that she has started to in her life realize, and I’m quoting here again, our world is optimized form well optimization. The Apple Watch gives me a real world feedback on how to improve my gait so that I maximize the efficiency of my steps and theoretically become an ideal daily walker, I suppose. And I’m moving down a bit and continuing to quote her it’s hard to escape the voice of efficiency and winning to an extreme. I’m not only afraid of taking risks, I’m afraid of valuing things that do not clearly communicate that I intend to win. We can’t just take a walk, we have to hike. We don’t just play a game of horse, we join a leak. We don’t merely knit, we set up an etsy shop. Having an end goal for everything I do has had an unintended effect on my choices. It has started to narrow my vision of what’s possible to things that I think I can win at doing. This is why I experiment with living life outside of optimization. My job description, the one she writes for herself has a version of not being the best at a few things but finding joy in doing things I’m not very good at doing at all. Over time, life can become smaller and smaller. Imagination can wane, creativity stagnates, choosing. The dangerous thing is about making my life bigger by making myself go deeper. And I’ve been skipping around and just reading highlights and at the very end she closes with having the nerve to tackle things I don’t know I can pull off is what I think some conservatives call character. I prefer to call it an honest desire to prove something new to myself. That’s a job only I can do and I’m getting a little bit of those goosebump chills Pooja. I think about how many things that she mentions in this article. You and I just talked about the importance of failure and taking those risks and something that I don’t think we talked about as much that I found really valuable just for myself is I do tend to wrote a book on productivity. This really resonated with me doing things for the enjoyment of it, even doing things that we’re not good at and the enjoyment we can get out of being better teachers by experiencing what it is like to do things that we are not good at. Because a lot of times people not myself, by the way, but most people I meet in academia were really, really good students. And that was really where their identity was wrapped around and maybe what came easy to them. And we’re going to be teaching a lot of people, most of us, for whom these things don’t come easy and to have that experience and relatability and empathy and ability to emulate what we’re asking them to do I just think is a beautiful thing. So that’s my recommendation for today and I’m going to pass it over to you for whatever you would like to recommend.

Pooja Agarwal [00:35:32]:

I have a resource I’d like to recommend and then an additional sort of more personal recommendation. I wanted to mention this resource and collaboration I’ve built of 40 scientists and for those listening who are interested in learning more about the science of learning. I have a list of 40 scientists who are women, scientists of color, and LGBTQ scientists. That’s really important to me as part of a diversity effort, and I hope you all check it out. If you go to Retrievalpractice.org Scientists, you can read more about all of the research efforts, the teaching tips that these scientists have been publishing and working on. Most of them are in higher education. We’re all professors for the most part as well. If anyone is interested in having speakers, wants to dive into the research, wants to conduct research at their universities or college, please please check out this resource to help support dei efforts and the science of learning. So that was one recommendation. I wanted to also share a recommendation for a nonprofit I am in love with called Vintage Pet Rescue. I just adopted a dog about a month ago, and she’s right here fast asleep at my feet. Her name is Fiona, and vintage pet rescue like vintage records, vintage jukeboxes. They specialize in senior dogs. They’re kind of like a doggy retirement home where they get senior dogs, they get them all up to date with their vet and blood work, and then they adopt them out. And it’s so rewarding to adopt a senior dog. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as sort of a first time dog get parent, but to really consider adopting an older dog just means the world to, I think, the dog to having a safe, secure place to live. And they’re not necessarily strays. A lot of senior dogs, their owners have passed away or their owners can no longer afford to keep them. The owners themselves are in nursing James or retirement homes. And it’s just such a wonderful emotional bonding experience. From my teacher perspective, it makes sure that I don’t course prep for too long. I have to take my dog for a walk. It makes sure that I’m not too meticulous with all of the things that need to be done, because I have this new thing in my life that I get to take care of. So even if you’re not located in New England, I hope you’ll check out Vintage Pet Rescue on social media, Facebook, Instagram, consider donating, but they have life. The best videos of the cutest dogs and just adorable photos. That’s a personal recommendation that I’d love for people to know more about.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:19]:

We exchanged messages and you talked about before you got the dog that it was coming into your life, but I didn’t know the backstory until now. And I’m so glad. I’m grateful for the recommendation segment just so we can have know sometimes tangents in our conversations, but this so deeply rooted to your life and to your work and sounds like it is enriching your life so much. What a wonderful joy Fiona brings to you and your family. That’s wonderful. Well, Pooja, I’m so glad to be connected with you again. And I mean still, I should say, but just to get to hear what you have been up to and a joy to get to see you today and spend some time talking.

Pooja Agarwal [00:38:54]:

Likewise. Thank you so much for sharing, Bonni. I really appreciated your recommendation and the quotes you shared from that too. They’re going to stick with me and I’ll learn them and retrieve them as well.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:05]:

Wonderful. Thanks so much. Thanks once again to Dr. Pooja Agarwal for joining me on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith. If you have yet to sign up for the weekly updates from Teaching in Higher Ed, I encourage you to head over to teachinginhired.com/subscribe. You’ll receive the show notes and the links from the most recent episode, as well as other things that don’t show up in the regular show notes, such as quotable, words, related episodes, other resources and recommendations. Thanks again for listening to today’s episode and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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