Advice to a New Professor, with Dave Stachowiak

[00:00:00] Dave: Today on Episode 369 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Bonni and I give some advice to a new professor.

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[00:00:09] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning: Maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:18] Bonni: 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.

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[00:00:46] Dave: Hi everyone. I’m Dave Stachowiak, I’m Bonni’s husband and she suggested that I might want to step into the host spot today on the podcast to ask a few questions about an email that came in from a new professor and thinking about this coming academic year. We did a bit of thinking and putting our heads together on what would be the advice that Bonni would have for someone coming into a new role, coming into a new academic year, and where we may start? I’m going to ask the questions today. Bonni, we’ll turn the tables on you a bit, and maybe I’ll jump in with a few ideas here as well. Welcome to your own show. [laughs]

[00:01:24] Bonni; Why thank you. It’s so great to be here.

[00:01:28] Dave: All right, let’s jump right in. You got an email from someone who had a few just general questions, coming into a new academic year, a full-time professor, first time, what would be the things I’d want to be thinking about or starting about? The first thing that probably is a good starting point is just intentions. When you think about intentions going into a new position like this, Bonni, why is it important to know intentions going in?

[00:01:57] Bonni; Any time that we go into a new role I think it’s really important for us to reflect what is our mission? What’s our purpose? Why are we taking this role? What’s going to be important to us? Many of you probably already did that in the form of some sort of an essay about your teaching philosophy. If you did that, I would encourage you to go back and revisit it, why are you doing this?

To me a lot of that has to do with who is it that I serve. Thinking about something that Kevin Gannon, who’s written a book about hope, a radical hope, [chuckles] in his own teaching talks about is that students aren’t our adversaries. I’d encourage you to remember that as well and to avoid ascribing intent around things. In fact, if you’re going to ascribe intent, it might as well be a positive one.

If someone shows up late to your class, rather than assuming that they were irresponsible, didn’t care about getting there on time, that they had intended on being there but something caused them to be way late. I would just really watch for that in terms of how you frame why you took this job, what your key fundamental purposes in doing it, what makes it meaningful, what makes it significant, and to avoid ascribing intent to students.

When things happen that may look a certain way to you, but you may not have enough information yet. I have now been teaching almost 20 years and I still have to fight that urge sometimes, but I’m better at it than when I began.

[00:03:36] Dave: I know you think a lot about transparency in teaching, Bonni. What are some ways that professors, particularly new faculty coming in, can be transparent in their teaching?

[00:03:49] Bonni; I think it’s important in two areas. One would just be in what we talk about with students in terms of our teaching. This to me has been surprising that it’s surprising that it’s surprising to me. Can I say that Dave?

[00:04:06] Dave: Sure.

[00:04:06] Bonni; In that the research talks about that us saying that we believe in our students actually matters. We know from some of the research around self-efficacy that it matters that students believe in themselves. That’s a really big component of one’s ability to thrive in their education, but it actually matters what professors think as well. Wanting to not just believe that but also to share it in transparent ways, “I care about your success and I believe in you.”

That can be hard to do because you don’t want to say it and not believe it. [chuckles] We also have to be finding ways in our teaching of being able to tap into people’s strengths, to tap into their unique context, and being able to draw that into our teaching. That’s an important thing. Then secondarily, when we’re creating assessments, there’s a great organization called The Transparency in Learning and Teaching, otherwise known as TILT.

That project helps us be able to create assignments that have relevance and then be transparent about them. For me, every single assignment inside of our learning management system, as I describe it, I talk about what is the assignment? What is it that they’re going to be expected to do? Why? Why is it relevant? Why am I having them do it? Then how? How do they go about doing it? In your teaching, make sure that you’re supporting that self-efficacy because it matters so much, and in your assessment make sure you’re transparent about the what, the why, and the how.

[00:05:52] Dave: Talk about the importance of patience in settling into a class and the importance of being patient and setting norms.

[00:06:00] Bonni; Oh gosh, this is so important. [chuckles] I have to go back to my first time teaching, Dave. I was an adjunct and I didn’t know any of the norms. I thought it was like my college experience, “Hey everybody, go ahead and take your textbooks out and put them on the table.” I think maybe one person might’ve had their textbook but let’s just say it wasn’t a norm to do that.

Even though all this time I’ve been teaching all these years, you still have to establish norms. Even if you have some of the same students in your class, it’s a new class, it’s a different dynamic. I find we need to be patient in setting some norms. One episode, Dave, that we did way back when, I don’t know the episode number, but if I had been smart it would have been episode number eight because it’s something called the Eight Second Rule.

This is an episode that we did early on about that in normal contexts, as in inside of a classroom if you’re facilitating some kind of experience, you ask a question as the facilitator or in this case, as the professor and then you count one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, all the way up to eight. You don’t do it out loud, by the way, you’re doing this [chuckling] in your head. That gives enough time to have people not only take in your question, make sense of it in their own mind, formulate an answer, and lastly, and I would say most importantly, decide “Is it safe for me to give an answer?”

We have to be patient in terms of setting the norm that when I ask a question, I’m not doing it rhetorically. I actually really want an answer and I’m keenly interested in what you have to say. Dave, I don’t know if you have found this to be the case, but I definitely have found in an online environment sometimes my eight seconds actually does go. Because I’ve said before, “Oh, you hardly ever get above eight uless they know you’re doing it, then they’re just trying to mess with your head.” [chuckles]

I have found in virtual environments that it does actually take, especially early on, more just to set that norm that, “Actually, I really do want to hear from you.” Sometimes I’ve even found myself having to count to more. By the way, some of this is because I give a choice if people would like to share aloud or if they would like to share in the chat. Sometimes they’re actually literally typing an answer, they’ve already gone through that, “Is it safe for me to answer here?” Speaking of is it safe for me to answer here, I also give them the option if they would like to share privately or out in public. Just depending on what it is I’m asking, in case it’s something that requires a more personal answer.

[00:08:52] Dave: So many people are uncomfortable with silence, and I think if we’re in the role as professor or facilitator as both you and I have been many times, Bonni, that we sometimes are most uncomfortable with that. Like if there’s silence in the room for five seconds or eight seconds, we feel like somehow we’re doing something wrong. That sometimes can be the best way to allow people to think about something, to allow those who may not jump into the conversation as quickly, for those who are more introverted, like me, who may not jump in right away to have the space to be able to think a bit quietly.

I’ll sometimes call attention to that, and I facilitate a lot online. If there will be silence, I’ll go the eight or nine seconds and just wait to see what someone says. Sometimes I’ll say, “We all need more silence in the world, don’t we, in order to spend some time thinking.” Then people kind of nod and then someone will say something. Once you’ve done that a couple of times and you create a norm with the group or with the class in this case that a little bit of silence is okay once in a while. That’s not a bad thing, we can take time to think, which we all need to do more of.

I actually use that as a teaching point as well. As part of being a critical thinker is to actually stop and think, and to consider your thoughts, and to consider a different way. You’re not going to do that entirely in eight seconds, but just to start to think about learning as not just a lecture or a conversation or I’m reading. Like I can actually stop and spend some time to think. Establishing that is a bit of a norm in a classroom, I think it’s a wonderful place to begin from.

[00:10:39] Bonni: Another aspect of this patience for me, is the patience to frame things as invitations not as restrictions. A classic example of this pre-COVID was the laptop bans. This tended to be treated in a very dichotomous way, there were people who said, “Have them all close the laptop and never could use a laptop in the class.” Or people who said, “100% of the time, let’s have those laptops open.”

I come down in the place that James Lang talks about in his book called Distracted. In that, we can actually invite people. “I’m going to have you go ahead and close down laptops, put away the phones, and I’m going to give you a sticky note and I’d like you to think about one way that, et cetera, et cetera.” Then, “I’m going to invite you actually to open up your laptops or take your phones out because I’ve got some poll questions for you. ”

That invitation, “Now we’re going to do this. Okay, take this out. Put that away,” in a very playful, fun way, it’s an invitation. “We’re going to do something fun. All right, we’re going to play a game.” That to me, is much more conducive to the kind of learning community that I want to create. Is it going to be possible that 100% of the time I get compliance? Probably not.

By the way, post-COVID, what that transitioned into rather quickly by the way, was whether or not we were going to require cameras. We could spend three whole episodes just talking about whether or not to require cameras. I think a similar thing can play out there in that, “I invite you to turn on your cameras because I’d love to be able to have us be able to see each other as we’re talking,” but not belabor it.

If people don’t, there are legitimate reasons why people can’t, whether it’s bandwidth issues or don’t want to. Again, we could do an entire episode on this thing. I more want us to be thinking in general, rather than a bunch of rules and legalism in our classes. Wouldn’t it be way more conducive to learning if we can engage people through invitations? Then the last one I wanted to mention is similar. In that, we can co-create an inclusive climate.

Rather than thinking about as me, I came today to cover a bunch of information. Anytime in my teaching or as I observe others teaching that we’re covering information, that’s generally a sign that very one-way thought processes are happening around. Learning takes place with an expert dumping information into non-experts’ heads. My hope would be we could recognize that regardless of the expertise of the people, we always have something that we can learn anytime a group of people get together.

Thinking about the ways that we can be co-creating a space where everyone can show up with their full identities and feel safe in doing so, feel safe in taking risks, feel safe in failing. One of the past guests, Robert Bjork, who runs a memory lab with his wife up at the University of California, Los Angeles, he talks about forgetting is the friend of learning. That’s something that I share with students, and not surprisingly, I sometimes forget things and they think I’m trying to prove a point, but it actually just happens naturally for me. [chuckle] I forget stuff. Help everyone feel like we can have an inclusive place where people can show up in their full selves.

[00:14:26] Dave: Could I thread two things together, Bonni, you just mentioned? I was thinking about showing up with different mediums. I think that all of us have a, when we get in front of a classroom or group, we tend to have an area for us that’s a bit more of a strength. We tend to lean on that more and sometimes we forget to show up in a different way.

One of the things I learned as a Carnegie instructor was to change up the medium every 10 or 15 minutes if you can. If you’re a natural lecturer, that you also bring in some group participation or working in pairs. If you are someone who tends to be more of a natural facilitator, that maybe you spend a little bit more time lecturing or as Bonni mentioned bringing in technology.

Changing that up inside of a class, whether that class is 40 minutes or that class is three hours, and especially if it’s longer, I think it’s really helpful of keeping people’s attention and appealing to interest. I’m thinking about what you said about laptops, Bonni, wherever you fall down on that. You and I went to grad school in the era where the message was like, “The more computers inside one room we can get, the better.” Everyone have a laptop, that laptops are always helpful.

The times that you and I tuned out in a classroom and ended up doing something else on our laptop that wasn’t related to the class I think, for me, at least, are the times that the instructor relied only on one medium. Either they showed up and they only lectured for 45 minutes. Or they showed up and there were three classes in a row of student presentations where you’re going again, and again, and again of the same medium over and over.

I think that that is an opportunity for all of us to stretch a bit. Whatever our comfort zone is on how we teach and interact, be willing to try something out, and even to say, “Hey, we’re trying out something different today. We haven’t done this before in the class.” I think it’s a great opportunity for a new faculty member to come in and just give yourself permission to try out some new things. If it works great, great, and if it doesn’t that’s okay.

As Bonni said part of this is a failure and I think we give a great gift to our students if we also show them that we’re struggling with things occasionally too. That normalizes failure and learning and the struggle as part of the process for all of us.

[00:16:47] Bonni: That’s actually a perfect segue, Dave, into this next area of how do we get learners to pay attention. I very carefully now have tried to stop phrasing things as getting someone to pay attention. Somebody pointed out, I can’t remember if it was Twitter or something like that, that when we say pay attention, it’s like, “Not only do I need you to focus on me, you’re going to have to pay for it too.” Just that expression has a unique paradigm to it.

In the book Distracted by James Lang, which I referenced earlier, he really talks about this. There’s some overlap to this last area we were just talking about of not expecting the ridiculous notion that people ever could pay attention and not be distracted 100% of the time. It really is an ebb and a flow. How do you bring people back? Just like Dave just talked about, changing things up.

If you are going to use a PowerPoint, then some of the times blank your screen, you can literally press the B key in most slide deck software and that will blank it out. Or if you want to then show a quick video clip that you’ve been talking for a while, you can change it up by showing a quick video. Is it a comic, is it a GF? Something that will change it up. By the way, it’s important when we talk about this, This relates to a body of research about cognitive load.

We are changing it up, but we can’t constantly be changing it up with things that don’t relate to what we’re talking about. It does have to be that whatever cartoon it is that you just showed because you’re going to try to bring some laughter in. It can’t just be a random cartoon that doesn’t relate to what you’re talking about. They do need to be in relation to each other.

That, “Okay, now I’m not showing the PowerPoint. Now we’re talking. Now I’m going to ask some questions. Now I’m going to do a poll. Now I’m going to ask you to predict.” That’s another thing, by the way, that shows up in the literature, “What do you think is going to happen next?” I’ve talked to a number of times, Dave, about this podcast that I still absolutely love.

It’s a Planet Money episode where they’re talking about a currency crisis in Brazil, and it really to me brings up issues of price stability. Most of us in the United States aren’t really familiar with what that really would look like. In the news recently there’s been things around inflation. I’m sure people that lived through the currency crisis [chuckles] in Brazil that I’m referring to would laugh at like, “Oh my gosh, that’s nothing. You know what, the money that you had would– A pair of jeans would cost $50 one day and $500 the next day,” that kind of price instability.

Anyway, it’s a story that they tell in audio form about bringing together these economists to help solve this problem. I paused it halfway through, and I say, “Now you’ve heard about what it was like where literally people are going through changing prices one right after the other, because they’re changing that quickly in a grocery store I think the example is.

Then pressing pause, “If you’re one of those economists that has to come in, how would you go about solving this problem? What would you recommend to the government that they do?” That act of prediction, even if you’re wrong, the act of prediction actually helps to solidify the learning. Once you find out what the right answer was or that thing, that can be really effectiv.

Then we’ve had many episodes about something called retrieval practice, where instead of spending much of time and effort pouring information into the minds of students, we can instead invite them to retrieve the knowledge as it is growing in their own neural networks inside their brains to go through regularly what’s called retrieval practice. I’ll have a bunch of links in the show notes that people can reference. If you’re not familiar with retrieval practice, how would you go about doing it, as well as an excellent website that can help get you started.

[00:21:02] Dave: So much of higher education is about learning. I know so many in your listening community, Bonni have a real heart for reading, and I know new faculty members do as well. If you were going to recommend a couple of books that would be a good starting point for a new faculty member, what comes up for you?

[00:21:20] Bonni; If it is past August or it’s in August of 2021 when you’re listening, then I want you to go to wherever you purchase your books and look up Small Teaching by James Lang, the second edition. Because, Dave, he’s coming out with the second edition of Small Teaching. I have not read it yet but will be shortly and I’m excited for all the new additions.

By the way, the first one is still an excellent read as well, but just because it’s coming out soon after this episode airs you might want to hold off a couple of two, three weeks before you listen and check out Small Teaching. The idea behind Small Teaching is that rather than think we have to create the equivalent of a motion picture, a big-budget motion picture, that there are incredibly small things that we can do that are like a fulcrum that helps to facilitate learning.

I’ve mentioned his techniques a number of times. He talks about retrieval practice in the book, he talks about prediction, he talks about this idea of changing things up, et cetera. Lots of ideas in there. Very practical things that people can do and I cannot recommend it enough. Then the next one, if you have a little bit more experience teaching, coming into your first perhaps full-time job, I really recommend the Skillful Teacher by Stephen Brookfield.

It all has gone through a couple of different versions as well. Stephen is such a gifted person at thinking reflectively about his own teaching and doing so in just incredible ways, and then modeling that for us and telling us how we can do that. I definitely recommend that resource. Those are two books that I have revisited time and time again that have benefited me incredibly in my teaching. I’m very grateful to both of those authors

[00:23:14] Dave: Can I add in a third recommendation?

[00:23:17] Bonni; Whoa, no. I think we’re limited to two today.

[00:23:18] Dave: Chuckles]

[00:23:18] Bonni; Absolutely, sure.

[00:23:20] Dave: The super-smart lady named Bonni Stachowiak wrote a book called The Productive Online and Offline Professor. I’m thinking about your book, Bonni because I recall when you went through your first year teaching full-time. I’m also thinking about some of your colleagues that have come on board in recent years, and it’s really overwhelming.

Any new job is overwhelming initially but a lot of times coming into a university in the first full-time role, I don’t know, it’s just so different than other kinds of jobs. In that, you are on one hand, very independent in what you are doing within the classroom. Especially if you come from another discipline or another industry where you’re used to having a boss who’s working with you and onboarding you on doing lots of things, within an organization.

Coming into a classroom and teaching with however many number of students is often very overwhelming at the beginning because you don’t get as much direction. Even if you’re coming from graduate studies and coming in for the first time, a lot of times master’s programs, PhD programs are highly structured, there’s a syllabus, there’s a curriculum you follow. All of a sudden you show up in the teaching world and you have a lot of flexibility and independence.

Then there’s the other part of that, which is there’s a whole community part of service to the institution that I think is really unique and unfamiliar to new faculty members when they come in and like, “Oh, I’m going to be sitting on committees. I’m going to be doing university-related activities that I really never received any training on. Or really gotten a lot of advice on how do I do this? How do I navigate committee assignments, all those kinds of things.”

All that to say is it’s a time where there’s a lot of complexity and newness and being able to think about how you handle your scheduling, your time management, your task management. Bonni, you do a really great job in your book of really illuminating lots of different ways to think about that well to handle a time where there’s a lot of complexity to establish systems for yourself where you can process a lot of that coming in.

It’s still going to be overwhelming a bit like any of us going into a new role, but I think that if you’ve got me good solid systems coming in, and to your point earlier, Bonni, maybe just start with something small. If you haven’t used a time management system before, maybe that’s the thing to start with. Or if you don’t have a task management system, start there. If you tend to plan out your weeks, maybe you begin to do that a bit. Pick one thing from the book and it will inevitably support you in making that transition easier and help you to be successful stepping into the role and learning faster than you might otherwise.

[00:26:14] Bonni; Thanks for mentioning the book, Dave. As you are aware, we just got back from, this next word is going to be said in air quotes, “camping” within air quotes, [chuckles] with our kids at a wonderful spot down in San Diego. Throughout the pandemic, I have not achieved a perfect record on maintaining even the productivity systems that I write about in that very book.

I can tell you even just having a foundation of knowing what to do when things get overwhelming and having a trusted system that at least at the very least, Dave, when I know something has a date associated with it, a due date, that’s in there. I’m going to get an alert that’s going to say that something’s due then. Part of that, by the way, is not putting due dates for things that don’t really have them. A system that I trust to have the information in there that is going to let me know and keep from going off the rails.

Anyway, I mentioned the camping because we’re coming back and we’re recording today, [chuckles] the day that we got back so that we can catch up on a few things. It’s nice even just to step into those trusted systems that are talked about in the book to step back. It feels way more peaceful than vacations before I really knew a lot about those kinds of systems and practiced them. Thank you for mentioning that.

[00:27:32] Dave: Yes, of course.

[00:27:33] Bonni; Speaking of productivity tools, before we get to the recommendations segment, I did want to thank today’s sponsor and that is TextExpander. Normally, I do these ad rolls by myself, but since Dave is here and is also a TextExpander user, let me first explain what TextExpander is, and then I’m going to invite him to share one of the ways he uses it. I know we use it on a daily basis, both of us.

TextExpander is what is known as a text expansion tool. You type in pre-defined little things they call snippets and you get to decide what that snippet is so that you can more easily remember it. My signatures are always around the letter X and then VU, if it’s my Vanguard and then SIG, as in signature, and then in pops the signature for that. Or XVU phone is my work phone number which I often don’t remember.

You can get a lot more sophisticated or keep it really simple. TextExpander is one of those tools I love because it can grow with you. You don’t have to learn a bunch just to get started using it, but boy, the more that you learn, the more that you can save even that much more time. Dave, what’s one way that you use TextExpander?.

[00:28:46] Dave: It’s such a fun service to talk about beause both of you and I used it long before the responses. One application I use is I try to think of the big picture. Anytime I find myself doing the same thing or writing the same thing or my triggers, if I go back and I find myself copying and pasting old emails, old sent emails that I’m going to send a similar message to someone else but I want to customize a little bit of it, that tends to be a trigger for me to create a TextExpander snippet. One example is I run online events with our community often and often I’m thanking an expert or guest speaker who’s come in to support us. I have a little snippet, mine, I’d start mine with Z, Bonni.

[00:29:30] Bonni; [chuckles]

[00:29:30] Dave: I’d type Z CFL thank. When I type that on the keyboard, it automatically populates in my form letter. I hesitate even to say form letter because it types in 90% of it that I want it to be the same for every event. Then it leaves spaces and I’ve programmed this in advance, and TextExpander makes this really easy where you can have spaces where you can fill in the person’s name, but you can also create spaces where you fill in other things that are customized.

That for me means that I automate the thing that is repeatable so I can spend more time on the customization piece. It’s a nice thank you letter each time and the core elements are always there.

Also, it’s customized each time so that I mentioned something that I really appreciated about that person or something that they said. It is both efficient and then it happens quickly, but it’s also meaningful and then it’s customized to that person. Because instead of spending the time finding the old one from six weeks ago, finding the email, copy and pasting thing, I just type in the snippet and I can spend my time really doing the thing that shouldn’t be automated, of really making it customized. That’s just one example. I probably use it, I don’t know, a dozen times a day. Bonni, you probably do too. It’s such a wonderful resource and Bonni probably has a link for it that I don’t know. [chuckles] I’ll hand it back to you, Bonni.

[00:30:53] Bonni; Head on over to Textexpander.com/podcast. That link will also be in the show notes for today’s episode. Once again, thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring today’s episode. This is the part in the show where each of us gets to share our recommendations. My recommendation is themed to today’s episode, which is we need to be asking for feedback regularly.

I’ve got a few articles or models that will help us do that. First off from Edsurge, why professors should ask students for feedback long before the semester is over. I should mention that I’m pretty good about asking for feedback along the way but oddly what I’m not good at is really planning that out the way in advance. I’ve been doing all of my classes now as high flex learning, which means that it has the flexibility where they can show up for a synchronous session, but they also could have an asynchronous option. I really do need to get ahead of this then and have that feedback built-in because if I do that it’s going to be that much more likely that it happens in a timely basis.

Also, that I don’t forget to do it or that it turns out to not be a great week because something comes up or whatever. Just having that built-in reduces that friction for me. I’m excited about being better at that this coming academic year. Stephen Brookfield, who I mentioned earlier, the author of over 30 books about teaching in higher education, including the Skilful Teacher that I mentioned previously, he has what he calls a critical incident questionnaire.

He does it practically every class session for what really had their attention, what really helped heighten their learning, and also the highs and the lows, what didn’t work for them that particular session. He has that tool on his website, which I’ll be linking to in the recommendations for this episode. Finally, Gardener Campbell has a similar idea. You may have heard of the nurse with the last name of Apgar who came up with the Apgar test that newborn babies get that assess their health when they are born.

He talked about what if we had one of those measures for a class session, the health of a class session. He’s got an idea around that on his blog. I’ve used Brookfield’s methods before, I’ve used Gardener Campbell’s. Gardener’s is more the one that I use most often in terms of, “What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? What should we continue doing?”

The fact is not that there’s a perfect method out there, the fact is doing it and then actually incorporating the feedback, and both being able to respond to what’s emerging in the moment, any trouble spots in a class, that kind of thing, but also over time, how much you can learn when you ask for feedback courageously is really, really a powerful thing in our teaching. Dave, what do you have to recommend for us today?

[00:33:53] Dave: I have two recommendations. The first one directly related to our conversation today, I had Tom Henschel as a guest on my podcast called Coaching for Leaders. Tom is a gifted executive coach and a dear friend, he is really an expert at helping people with their communication. We had an episode on the way to make sense to others. Tom talked us through the process of what he called sorting and labelling. How do you sort your ideas effectively and then label them in your communications to others?

I think that this would be especially useful for new faculty thinking about lecturing. The times when you’re doing lecturing as part of your classes, how you might use a framework like that in order to sort and label in a way that helps something makes sense to others, especially others who may not have the same expertise that you do. That’d be very useful, but also very useful in conversations with colleagues and other faculty and other folks across the institution.

The Way to Make Sense to others with Tom Henschel. I’d recommend I’ll make sure Bonni gets it in the notes and then the second one completely unrelated, Bonni knows that I have a heart for national parks and for conservation and we are often trying to get our kids outdoors and appreciating the earth. There’s so much going on in the world as far as our earth and the environment and climate change that at an individual level many of us do not have a ton of personal control over and yet one of the things that we have a lot of control for is the heart and care that we instil in our kids and young people in our lives to care about the world.

A podcast that has come up on my radar screen and I’ve been listening to for the last year is called The Wild by Chris Morgan, he’s a bear biologist. There’s a fancier name for that, but I can’t remember at the moment. The show is just this beautiful, beautiful, look at each episode at a different animal or a different ecosystem. Or different part of the world, and conservation efforts, and learning about the history and the animals and the wildlife.

It’s really, really beautifully done. It is out of the NPR affiliate in the Seattle area, KUOW, I believe. A beautiful show I love it, and our kids also love it. We listen to it whenever we go down to the for whatever reason, whenever we go to the beach, [chuckles] which is not far from where we live. We listen to the wild episodes and it’s just been a wonderful companion on our journey of learning about environment and conservation and climate change. I’d recommend The Wild podcast by Chris Morgan.

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[00:36:42] Bonni; Thanks, Dave, for taking over as hosts today. Thanks to all of you for listening to today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. If you’d like to receive all of the show notes and some extra goodies to some quotable words, other recommendations that don’t show up in the podcast episodes. I encourage you to subscribe to my weekly newsletter and you can do that at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks once again to TextExpander for not only sponsoring today’s episode but for actually saving us time every single day of our computing lives. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed. Thanks, Dave.

[00:37:24] Dave: Thanks, Bonni. It was fun. Have a great day, everybody.

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