[00:00:01] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on Episode Number 470 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, building community in the college classroom, with Robert Eaton and Bonnie Moon, with a cameo appearance by Steve Hunsaker later in the episode.

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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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Rob and Bonnie, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:00:53] Bonnie Moon: Thank you for having us back. We’re so excited.

[00:00:56] Rob Eaton: We’re just grateful to be invited back anywhere, Bonni. Thank you.

[laughter]

[00:01:00] Bonni: Well, you’re such good guests already. You’ve brought the– I was trying to think of a housewarming sort of thing, but I can’t do it, I can’t come up with my virtual analogies right now. You’ve been on the show before, and rather than going through your bios, for anyone who’s interested in reading them in their fullest, they will be on the show notes page, but wanted to hear a little bit about you, but also a little bit about your experiences with building learning communities.

Bonnie, let’s start with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about an experience that comes to mind for you in building community, or not, in a learning context.

[00:01:39] Bonnie: Thank you. I teach mathematics at BYU Idaho, and I also am the committee chair for the women in STEM in our college, which I really enjoy. I just wanted to share maybe a couple of the things that come to mind when I think of building community. One, is that when I was first hired on full-time here, I was brought in on a team, and this team’s job was to create a new course, a statistics course that we were going to pilot at the face-to-face level and then send it online.

I think just remembering back to those days, I felt a little apprehensive to just be pushed onto a team, but looking back, I am so grateful I was because coming in as a new person and having my people, there were four or five of us that just had a small collaborative group. To see that we actually did have different talents and different expertise that we brought to the group and each one of us was needed and to be able to start my tenure here at BYU Idaho, as part of this team, brought me into the university in a way that I don’t think would have happened if I hadn’t had a purpose and a reason to come and work.

I was teaching students, which was wonderful, too, that did bring purpose, but even more than that, just feeling part of a team and knowing that my contributions were important, and that if I didn’t show up, they would miss me.

[00:03:00] Bonni: Your story brings up such a wonderful example that all of us don’t always know in advance what’s going to be the most nourishing for us and what might facilitate the deepest learning. I’m thinking about the times when I’ve entered into learning spaces and might be the one to sit all the way in the back of the room, as far away as humanly possible. Sometimes the serendipitous ways that people– we get brought together, but Bonnie, your story just reminds us we don’t always do that with excitement from the very beginning.

You don’t know what’s going to happen on the other end. I’m excited about today’s conversation where we can learn more about how to build community in the college classroom, and especially with that in mind, where we may not initially be so excited about the group project or the opportunities to work with colleagues and that type of thing. Well, Rob, we’d love to hear a little bit about you and also what story or stories may come to mind for you as we think about building learning communities.

[00:04:10] Rob: I think one important biographical detail we didn’t get to last time is that I do play the accordion quite badly. I think it’s important for people to know that. As you were asking about a great experience we’d had with the collaborative learning community, an interesting experience came to mind. Years ago, we overhauled general education here. I had been a proponent of creating an interdisciplinary class that focused on another country or another region that would help students better learn to understand people who are different than them by understanding their backstories. I should have anticipated they would then come to me and say, “Great. Now create one.”

They assigned to me people I literally never met before. It’s almost like the beginning to a joke. An economist, a Russian professor, a geographer, and a religion professor, walk into a bar and come out with a new GE course. I still remember we had this off-site retreating, going to the grocery store and shopping and just learning about how the economist approach shopping differently than the rest of us.

It was a delightful interactive experience where we drew from our different perspectives, our different areas of expertise, and then as we got the course off the ground, we added people, including our co-author, Steve Hunsaker. We had weekly meetings. We had this infrastructure I didn’t have for any of my other courses where we could share ideas, and we were vulnerable.

We started with what failed, how’d you crash and burn last week, what went well, what are you going to do next week? This is what we were teaching. It has been one of the highlights of my teaching career. I’m grateful for how it introduced me to Steve Hansaker. For years, my exposure to the scholarship of learning and teaching was asking Steve what he’d read recently. It really wasn’t until working on the project for this book that I began to pay the price seriously myself doing my own reading, but Steve really has taught me so much through the years about the scholarship of learning and teaching.

[00:05:59] Bonni: Would you talk a bit more about Steve’s contribution to the book, specifically with not just an analogy, but an actual experience he’s had with a warm blanket around his shoulders and how important that can be, that idea can be, to bring those types of comforts into a learning community?

[00:06:18] Bonnie: I’ll speak to that. I miss Steve. I would love to have him here with us, but I’ll speak a little bit to his introduction. If you read the book, at the very beginning, he does share with us, I’ll just quote, he says, “I have Parkinson’s, an irreversible progressive disease. Since my diagnosis in 2010, I have come to understand the degenerative part of irreversible.”

Just so you know a little bit about him, he would come, but it’s sometimes hard for him to get the words across that he would like to share because of this Parkinson’s. One thing that I would like to add is to thank him right away for his contributions, especially on the research, like Rob was saying, all of his scholarly contributions and experiences, but the warm blankets. The warm blanket analogy, if you think of being in a hospital, and the coldness of that atmosphere, Steve, brought in this warm blanket idea that nothing feels better than when you’re in that stark environment, just feeling vulnerable, than someone bringing a warm blanket and putting it around your shoulders.

In the chapter that we’ve written on the building community, we refer to some of the practical applications as these warm blankets. Thank you, Steve, for that analogy. That’s where we can head if you’d like to head that direction. There’s a few warm blankets we can talk about, but that’s where that comes from.

[00:07:47] Rob: Can I just throw out one other thought about warm blankets? I’m about to make a professional transition and go teach at our sister institution, BYU. I’m 59. I should be reasonably comfortable with my self-esteem in life. I feel like a seventh grader going to a new junior high, and I’m so grateful for a few gracious future colleagues there who’ve reached out in very kind ways, with small gestures that have been little warm blankets for me.

It can be hard for us to remember, as professors who’ve been in place for a while, what our students feel like when they often leave behind family and friends, come into a new class where maybe they don’t know anyone at all to wonder how am I going to be received here. Warm blankets are small things we can do to make people feel welcome, make them feel like they belong.

[00:08:33] Bonni: Well, I mentioned in the intro to this episode that we’d have a cameo from Steve. Here’s a segment with Rob interviewing Steve about his journey with Parkinson’s and the warm blankets he’d choose to build community in the classroom.

[00:08:51] Rob: Steve, in our book, you shared an experience about disclosing something about your Parkinson’s to your class. Would you mind sharing that story and just your thoughts about how appropriate vulnerability with our students can build that bond, that vertical connection between our students or shrink the psychological gap between professors and students?

[00:09:12] Steve Hunsaker: That’s interesting. If there was a great experience for me, it was during the COVID months or semesters when we were not meeting in person, and I’d had a frustrating day with a mouse. That’s one thing I’ve discovered that Parkinson’s is really hard on my ability to use a … to control a mouse.

[00:09:29] Rob: I didn’t even think of that.

[00:09:30] Steve: In that situation, where you’re trying to keep track, there’s a couple monitors, and the sound, and all those things going on there with the distance teaching, I had been unable to click on the right button. For some reason, I got frustrated, and at cross mood, blamed the problem on the Parkinson’s. The students had never heard anything about the Parkinson’s. I was embarrassed that I had brought that up and throwing that disease under the bus, blaming everything on the disease.

[00:10:00] Rob: Maybe fairly in that particular case. How many years have you had Parkinson’s? How long has it been since your diagnosis?

[00:10:05] Steve: That time it would’ve been about 10 years.

[00:10:08] Rob: Now, about 12?

[00:10:09] Steve: Yes, 12, 13 now. At this rate, I grumpily said that it was all to be blamed on Parkinson’s. A student, I still remember hearing this in the corner of my ear since we were listening to people on microphones all around the country, heard this little voice say, “It’s all right. You can tell us.” That was just a moment of grace for that student to extend that permission for me to be weak and to be vulnerable.

It was a beautiful moment. I didn’t know at the time who it was, but I’ve since learned it was a very sweet young lady who is doing great things. She really lightened my load that day by saying that it was okay to be weak and not to be perfect.

[00:10:49] Rob: Wow. Speaking of that, and I’m just curious, how has Parkinson’s changed the way you approach teaching, but especially when it comes to students who deal with their own challenges, whether it’s mental health challenges or disabilities of some kind?

[00:11:07] Steve: I’ve found that being open about the Parkinson’s has been a very important thing for me. I’ll just say that I suspect that most of us have people in our group of contacts and acquaintances who have little respect for boundaries. There are people out there who seem to speak in order to make other people squirm, people who like to make us uncomfortable.

I’ll just be clear about this and say that sharing overly personal information isn’t vulnerability. That’s not what I’m talking about when I say vulnerability. That’s just TMI, too much information. [laughter] In the context of a college class, vulnerability, I would define that it’s something like intentional exposure to potential ridicule in order to meet an educational need.

In that spirit, and from the first day of class, I shared with my class that I do have Parkinson’s, and that it brings up some issues that they need to know about because it could potentially affect their learning. I used to like to make a little joke, say if I sneeze, cover your face and make sure you’re covered so you don’t catch Parkinson’s. [laughter] That’s a lot less funny than it used to be, given COVID. It used to be quite hilarious. Students don’t laugh about that too much anymore.

[00:12:17] Rob: I’m curious, how do you think that act of intentional vulnerability establishes community in the classroom? What kind of reaction do you sense from students?

[00:12:26] Steve: I hope it has a good effect. I think it does. I see people relax a little bit. They may have been seeing the tremor in the hand. They may have seen the slow gauge as I came into the room. They may have wondered, “What’s wrong with this guy?” I think by addressing it candidly and openly on the first day, I think it reduces some of the tension in the air.

It just builds some community and some connection. I certainly take no pleasure in focusing the attention on my inadequacies. I don’t like to do it and I don’t like to draw attention to my soft and sometimes incoherent voice. I don’t like to make it clear and obvious to them that I can’t write legibly on the whiteboard or anywhere else. The tremor, the overall slowness, and the occasionally need to rely on a cane.

I don’t like drawing attention to those things, but because I’m aware that those symptoms could potentially negatively impact the student’s ability to learn if they’re distracted by my voice or by the tremor or something like that, I think it’s really important to get it out there and keep it on the table and open, even though I’d much prefer to be silent about it. I’d rather not say anything. I’d rather not draw attention to myself.

[00:13:35] Rob: By the way, thank you for being willing to share these personal details with this podcast. It’s wonderful. One other question. If you could choose one warm blanket of your own as we talk about warm blankets techniques we can use in fostering a sense of community in our classrooms, what would it be?

[00:13:54] Steve: You remember the Felten and Lambert book, Relationship-Rich Education.

[00:13:58] Rob: Love it.

[00:13:59] Steve: Great book. I was paging through that book the other day, and I came across a simple set of four short sentences that really struck me. Those were, see them, listen to them, encourage them, and challenge them. Speaking of students, see them, listen to them, encourage them, and challenge them. Rather than just give you one– Wait, could I give you four based on those four thoughts?

[00:14:26] Rob: Absolutely.

[00:14:28] Steve: See them. I think we need to learn to see our students in all their messy, imperfect, and underdevelopment potential field of humanity. When you see them in our context, we might say, see them as children of God.

[00:14:39] Rob: Because we’re here at a religiously sponsored college.

[00:14:44] Steve: Right. Listen to them. I think we need to learn to listen to and respond to our students’ often wildly imaginative career plans without sarcasm,-

[00:14:55] Rob: [laughs] I need to work on this.

[00:14:57] Steve: -to their confident, but naïve understanding of difficult concepts without condescension, and to their anxiety-laced self-assessments without judgment. Listen to them, encourage them. We need to prepare to encourage disheartened students. Even though we may know that they’re capable of more, our students may be convinced they’re already performing at the absolute limit of their capabilities.

I think we need to be there to encourage them in those moments when you think they can’t do anymore. Finally, we need to challenge them. I think we all need to aspire to become the coach who can coach from a talented, anxious athlete, the performance of a lifetime. I think that coaching metaphor would be one we could all do well to adopt in our how we view things with our students. That’s what I would say for four small but warm blankets. Maybe not blankets, maybe just four warm handkerchiefs, but there’s [laughter] just four thoughts.

[00:15:50] Rob: Beautiful. Thank you, Steve.

[00:15:52] Bonni: Thanks so much, Steve, for sharing about vulnerability in teaching. Now, Rob, could you share a little bit about some of the theoretical frameworks around building community between faculty and students?

[00:16:07] Rob: Actually, we’ve got a couple of different chapters. One focuses on what you might think of as the vertical relationship between faculty and students, and then the other is the horizontal relationship between students. It’s interesting, as we ask students a bunch of questions in a survey, we were surprised that what came out at the top was how they felt faculty felt about them.

That was consistent with a bunch of research. We shouldn’t have been surprised, but let me just pull up something here. For example, a 2018 survey of college graduates found that graduates who had 7 to 10 significant relationships with their professors or staff were more than 3 times as likely to report their college experience is very rewarding as compared to graduates with no such relationships.

Then I love the Great Jobs, Great Lives 2014 study done by Gallup and Purdue. They found that feeling supported and having deep learning experiences means everything when it comes to long-term outcomes for college graduates. What I loved about that study was it wasn’t just in the moment, how happy are you, how much do you like college, how much would you like to take this professor again?

It was years after the fact asking some questions about their college experience, and how are you doing now? They found that the students who’d had more connections with their faculty were nearly three times more as likely to be thriving by their definition than those who didn’t feel supported. In fact, one of the key questions was, did your faculty care about you?

What was discouraging was how few students, what a small percentage, only 27% strongly agreed that their professors cared about them. I’ve been meaning to add that question to the institutional survey for my classes, but I haven’t yet. To what extent do you feel your professor cares about you? I’d like to move the needle on that. Moving the needle on that, it turns out if I could suggest one intervention, regardless of what positive teaching outcome or learning outcome you were looking for, it probably would be that one, how students feel about you.

I was doing a focus group for a subsequent book and a chapter on democratizing participation. I’d written the chapter, the draft of it. I was doing a focus group looking for some comments that related to the tactics I’d highlighted in the chapter. I was asking, what kinds of things do professors do in classes where you’re more likely to volunteer a comment? They kept saying things like, “They’re nice. They care about me.”

I’m like, “What do they do?” They’re thinking, “You’re not getting it.” Then I finally came across this study where sure enough of 15 different variables they tested for in a survey, the one that had the strongest correlation, the student’s willingness to raise their hands was their sense of how the professor felt about them. That sense of connection or community between faculty members and individual students is critical, not just for wellness and mental health, but for almost any learning metric we can measure.

[00:19:04] Bonni: I have a lot of homework to do on this, what I’m about to share. I’ve shared on recent episodes too, this question, did your professor care about you? That is something that I have informally started to ask in my classes because it isn’t on our institution’s formal survey. I’m interested in that question somewhat, but I’m more interested in what is it that contributed to that sense of care?

I do recognize because this particular way that I go about asking for this kind of input is not anonymous, so I do lose something in it. So far, I get high marks on showing that I care. What’s been interesting is why, though? It has moved around. Every semester, it’s slightly more emphasis on things. Early on, as you would expect during some of the peak times of COVID, flexibility in deadlines, and then it switched to be about feedback and the kinds of feedback, but it’s something that when you were talking got me thinking about it’s the feedback.

Not just fix this and prove this, but literally, and I know that this has been written about, and I just have to dive more into the research, there is feedback that just lets you know that I see you. There is a human being on the other side of this thing [laughs] that is particularly intriguing to me as it relates to that sense of care. It’s a body of research I’d like to go and learn and discover more about. Anyway, sorry. You got me excited thinking about this potential for research and how important that is. I also have thought about, should this really be on our institution’s formal survey?

[00:20:51] Rob: Years ago, we did a video interview with some students and a student who was a quadriplegic we’d interviewed, and we were asking about professors knowing their names. He said, “When they know my name, I feel like they see me.”

[00:21:05] Bonni: Oh, that’s beautiful. All right. Bonnie, did anything come to mind [laughs] for you in terms of that sense of care and some of the ways that we can, in more intentional and practical ways, provide those kinds of warm blankets? Rob just gave us, of course, knowing people’s names. What else comes to mind for you?

[00:21:27] Bonnie: I’ll add something. Just last night, [laughs] my college son Zoomed with me because he had a math question. He was talking about his professor, and he said, “Mom, I think I’m going to make it in this class.” I said, “How come? How come you’re going to make it?” because usually, he’s an engineering major, and he’s stressing out about the math and all of the physics.

It does not come easy to him. He works really hard. He said, “Because my teacher did two things. He takes the time to help us make sense of what he’s teaching, and he cares that we understand, and he’ll stop for questions. Then the second thing is, today I went to his office, he requires us to come to his office and meet with him. I got to meet with him one-on-one today, and he knows my name, and he asked me about what I’m doing,” and just shared a few things with me about that office visit.

It wasn’t long, but he said, “That is the first teacher that has done that.” He said, “I loved it.” He’s like, “I’m going to succeed.” I think he’s even more motivated now to work harder because he knows this teacher cares and believes in him. I’m excited for him.

[00:22:38] Bonni: That’s so helpful to think about because we don’t always think about that because that would be the kind of thing that would provide some resistance on the part of the student, but after the fact, they may see some of the benefits in new ways that they didn’t know initially because this came up with a conversation with one of my colleagues.

For anyone listening, I would just encourage you maybe not to think about if you were to take this idea that Bonnie just shared from her son’s professor, don’t think about it necessarily as always having to add these things on top of our classes. You could have a week where that week is for the sole purpose of opening up not just your schedule, but also the student’s schedules to be able to come and have those meetings with you.

One of my colleagues said, “Wait, I could do that? I would be allowed to do that?” They felt like they had to keep that very high structure in their class schedule and didn’t realize they would have the ability to make those kinds of adjustments to add these things in. I’m saying this as someone who also needs to remind myself of this. If you’re going to add some new stuff in, what’s going to go? [laughs]

[00:23:44] Rob: It’s something you can do in one class when you can’t afford to do it in every class. You might choose a class where you’ve got the most first year students, and incidentally, I think the sense of community, both vertically and horizontally, is probably most important for our students earliest in their careers to help them feel welcome. Boy, I’ve had some wonderful conversations with those first year students during those meetings.

Just lately, I’ve stumbled upon a simple technique. I said, “Have you got your phone with you? Would you mind showing me a photo or two that will help me better understand you?” It is fascinating what they will show me. Sometimes it’s just a picture of their family, and I can see they’ve got a special needs sibling. That opens the door to a very revealing, touching conversation sometimes. It’s really helped me feel a greater sense of connection.

Students show me things they’ve made, pets they love, and actually, as we assumed would be the case with our Pakistan class, the better I understand students’ backstories, the more empathy, the more compassion I have for them, the more I treat them like real people and not just some object.

[00:24:51] Bonnie: Could I emphasize the point? Actually, you both made really important points as I was listening. The first one is, we don’t want to overwhelm professors. Professors have a lot on their plates too. They’re building curriculum, they’re getting ready for class, some are researching, and they have other responsibilities outside the classroom.

How do we do this naturally that we’re not overwhelming? I love what Rob said about show me a picture on your phone. It’s an easy thing to do that you could build into five minutes before class. A lot of times I picture myself getting into class, running to get the overhead on, just getting on the computer, and I don’t really see my students.

[laughs] With a little preparation, could we have a TA or get the computer going, and could we sit down for a couple minutes with a student, ask how they’re doing, have them show the phone picture, or just ask them about an assignment, and use that time in a different way? Then when your students come in, they start seeing that you’re not up at the front separated from them. You’re with them, and you’re talking to them.

Depends on resources if we can get that TA or not, but one other way that I have used my TA, and I’m so grateful for a teaching assistant, not just to help me with evaluation and grading, but I like to use my TA on Mondays in one class. It’s a five-day a week class, and every Monday I have a lab. During that lab, we have an activity that the TA helps with. Then I pull the students out one at a time for five minutes for their interviews, and I have one-on-one interviews, so like you were saying, where we couldn’t possibly restructure the course to make things that are important to us more possible. I appreciate that. Thanks.

[00:26:28] Rob: By the way, that advice stings because even though I’ve given it regularly about show up early enough to sit down next to one student, I way too often am either reading some news on the internet to relax for a bit or refining fonts literally on my slides. Our thought is that there’s a lot more benefit to– Last semester, for example, I got there early, sat next to a student who hadn’t made many comments, pretty reserved. Within five minutes, I found out within the last two years she’d had two siblings who’d attempted suicide, and that she was struggling with some serious mental health challenges herself.

Then we are able to schedule another time to come in and talk more and connect her with some resources, but it’s amazing how we can connect even in a short period of time if we just intentionally sit down next to a student we think might benefit from warm blanket.

[00:27:17] Bonni: Just yesterday I was talking to a colleague about Peter Newbury’s technique that he uses, and he’s an astrologi– Oh my gosh. I keep–

[00:27:29] Rob: Astronomist.

[00:27:30] Bonni: I know. Isn’t that so funny?

[00:27:31] Rob: I make the same mistake. It sounds so similar.

[00:27:34] Bonni: Are you a Libra? [laughter] Are you a Taurus?

[00:27:37] Rob: I’m a Capricorn.

[laughter]

[00:27:41] Bonni: Every time, it’s like you could see my face that I knew I was going to do it while the words still came out of my mouth.

[00:27:48] Rob: I’ll just leave this in. Please leave this in.

[laughter]

[00:27:53] Bonni: Wow. This has to be–

[00:27:55] Rob: Vulnerability, by the way, it’s one of your great assets as a host. It’s also one of the great things that professors can do, but students somehow feel a sense of connection when we’re real and don’t hide our flaws and challenges.

[00:28:07] Bonni: Oh, it’s so true. It’s so true. [laughs] I still remember sneezing in the middle of a pencast. Back then, it was so darn hard to ever go back and edit that I was just in my head thinking, there’s no way I’m starting this thing again. [laughter] The students said I had the funniest, cutest sneeze they had ever heard.

I met their roommates, and they would be, “I heard your voice, and you sound just like my– Are you the one who sneezed that time?” I was famous [laughter] across campus for this sneeze. Peter Newbury, who studies astronomy, [laughter] there we go, would have up on the projector a beautiful picture of whatever it is that people who study that discipline have up there.

He would have the words, what do you notice, what do you wonder? Even though it necessarily may not be that he got to sit down next to each student as they came in, he’s still inviting them to contribute and start thinking and move toward that orientation of community. Then he would begin the class by asking them what they noticed and they wondered.

I’m also thinking it could be interesting to maybe have a Google Jam board up there or a Padlet up there where people could begin to contribute to some discussions. I would just warn, though, I think back to a colleague who teaches at the University of [laughs] California Irvine. When I first met her, we were talking about using polling tools, and she was just early in her teaching and taught really large lectures.

I realized as someone who was trying to model this for her without her actually seeing me do it, it had completely failed, but it was because she left it up there the whole time. Then people, they have fun with it. Definitely the size of your class would matter and the degree to which you wanted to just have no … coming out on the screen. Your context matters, right?

[00:30:04] Rob: Absolutely.

[00:30:05] Bonni: Yes. Before we get to the recommendations segment, is there anything that you wanted to add in terms of mentorship, which, of course, is paralleling everything that you’ve talked about thus far but might extend beyond a specific class-professor relationship, and can really move beyond those arbitrary limits?

[00:30:27] Rob: I’ll throw out one thought that we discuss in the book. It’s mentoring in the moment. I’ve got the phrase from Peter Felten and Adam Lambert, who got it from Brad Johnson at the US Naval Academy. He talks about the opportunities to be a mentor of the moment. I’ve found this really compelling to look for an opportunity every day to just be a mentor in passing. What they talked about is sometimes when we think mentor we think Dumbledore and Harry Potter, this lifelong relationship, but it can be as simple as one time it was the second week of school, I walked past a student, and he had a piece of paper in his hand looking around the building like students usually did the first day of class or the day before the first day of class. I was in a hurry to go somewhere, but I thought I should just stop and ask.

I asked, “Can I help you find anything?” He said, “Is this the John Taylor building?” I hadn’t heard it called the John Taylor building in a long time. I said, “Yes, this is the Taylor building.” I said, “Can I help you with anything else?” He said, “Where’s the Rick’s building?” I took him outside and pointed the way, and then I said, “May I ask why you’re asking this on the second day of class?” He’s just gotten home two days before from serving a full-time mission for our church, but he was coming to school a week and a half late.

I said, “This is a little challenging. Can I share an idea with you?” He said, “Sure.” I said, “Email your professors. Let them know you haven’t just been slacking, that you just got here. Ask if you can meet with him individually and tell them you want to catch up and ask how.” He was so grateful. It took me all of two minutes. I’ve never seen him again. I think that’s mentoring in the moment, just to look for opportunities to help students out, and I hope he felt a little bit of a warm blanket as he came in undoubtedly with some anxiety getting a late start on his semester.

[00:32:14] Bonni: This is such a great reminder for us all. I put so much pressure on myself that it does have to be this never-ending relationship, but that we really can be that mentor. Something that I picked up on that story you just shared is I’ve seen so many faculty, and myself very much included, where we get angry. Students might come, and they maybe have missed some days of class, and they might ask, “Did I miss anything?” I used to get so angry.

[00:32:44] Rob: Me too.

[00:32:45] Bonni: Fortunately, I don’t speak every word that comes to mind, but internally, I was angry and who are we kidding that that doesn’t come through in the relationship in some way, whether or not we actually speak those words of anger or not. Did I miss anything? Yes, you really did. Today I see it so differently because, as you shared, assuming the best, having that we don’t put all this baggage onto that relationship, and now I just think they don’t know.

Just like you talking about going to your new career opportunity, feeling like that kid, well, guess what, that feeling of I’m not sure I belong here, I don’t know the rules, socially, I feel awkward, now I’m able to have a much more gracious understanding of why someone may say that. The way that you coach that individual just to be, “Oh, I really want to get caught up, would I have the opportunity,” helps set them in their language, taught them in that moment for how to approach those professors. That’s wonderful.

[00:33:48] Rob: Thank you. Can I slip in one other related thought to this mentoring in the moment? I apologize if I shared this last time, but we’d be talking about this, and then in a day where I’d be preparing for a presentation, I’d get an email from a student saying, “I’m going to be gone on Monday. I got to go home for a funeral. Is there any way I can make up class?” I would catch myself saying, “Yes, here’s the relevant provision from the syllabus about how you can make up class,” and then the thought would come to me, “Did you catch the word funeral, Rob? Anything more you can do with that?”

I’ve found that like another seven seconds, I can type in, “May I ask whose funeral it is?” They’ll say, “It’s my grandmother.” I can type back and say, “Tell me a little bit about your grandmother. What did you love about her? What will you miss?” Maybe 15 seconds extra total on my part to be a human, to transform that interaction from something that’s transactional to connective and relationship-building.

[00:34:44] Bonni: All the way back to the warm blanket. Taking those moments to pause. It doesn’t take that long, and the payoff is enormous, transformative in fact. It’s almost time for the recommendations segment, but before we get there, allow me to thank today’s sponsor, and that is TextExpander. TextExpander is one of the first tools that I install on any new device. What it does is save me time such that I’m able to spend time on the more important thing.

Let me explain how this works. You type in characters that you easily designate, and they expand into either longer form text such as, for me, the podcast show notes, or they expand into things that are hard for me to remember, like my work phone number that I don’t give out to people that often. TextExpander, as I mentioned, it’s really easy to set up these snippets, and they show up wherever it is that you type.

Whether you’re in a word processor, in an email, on the web, TextExpander is there ready to go into work for you. What I like about it is how easy it is to search for these snippets, the little pieces of text that you set up, if you don’t remember what you set them up to be. I actually learned this from someone at TextExpander recently. On my keyboard, there’s a easy keyboard shortcut.

On the Mac, it’s Command/, and of course, on a PC, Control/.

It brings up a little search bar where I can type in the snippet and be ready to go and implementing it wherever it is that my cursor is currently placed. I thank TextExpander for your sponsorship. Again, I mentioned getting to talk with someone there recently because we’ve decided to go all in with TextExpander and start using their Teams feature. I’ve been using it as an individual for years now, and we’re early, early in our experimentation with the Teams, and it’s really, really fun.

You can still have all of your private individual text snippets, but you can easily then start to share them with different kinds of teams. They have a very unique model as far as you buy these units. You only get charged if you’re actually– Every team member is using TextExpander on a monthly basis. It’s just been a delight and a joy and really easy onboarding. Head over to textexpander.com/podcast. Give it a try. There’s a video there to learn a little bit more about TextExpander.

You can redeem a special offer for Teaching in Higher Ed listeners, 20% off your order, and also take advantage of a free trial. Thanks, once again, to TextExpander for sponsoring today’s episode. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I really want to just recommend that we just make our colleagues weep. No, I’m kidding. As of this recording, I am getting ready, or I’ve already began putting together a recap video of our academic year with some of the highlights.

I have two songs I want to recommend today. The first one, I’m laughing, but I’m also crying. It’s a beautiful song from the musical Wicked. The song is called For Good. One of my music colleagues is going on to a new opportunity after working with us for 22 years. Her fellow music colleague sang the lyrics from the song to her, “Because I knew you, because I knew you, I have been changed for good.” I will tell you, we also had another former colleague pass away this last year.

We are saying goodbye to some students who we have come to really love and care for. That song, boy, I will tell you, you will make yourself– I’m working on the video, and I keep going to play it back, and I’m just sobbing and sobbing. It’s a beautiful song. It’s been playing on the soundtrack in my head so much and a wonderful way to think about the transformations in our lives, whether it is a colleague who we have lost, whether it is a colleague who’s moving on to other career things in their life, we really have been transformed, and thinking about saying goodbye to students as well.

The second song I want to recommend, of course, this is not the entire highlight video is not weep worthy, but the first part is a little bit more upbeat. As someone who thinks a lot about music, I was thinking about this song that many of us sang in our childhood called This Little Light of Mine, I’m Gonna Let it Shine. I found a version of it which I like a lot, but it was too jolting to go from the super, super upbeat one that I found into the For Good from the Wicked soundtrack.

I just typed in this little light of mine and I found that Sam Cooke did a version of it. My goodness, it’s a spectacular version of This Little Light of Mine, a little bit of a slower beat and a groove to it that’s really, really fun. If any of you sang that song growing up, it’s a really fun rendition of it. Sam Cooke. Those are my two recommendations for today. I don’t really want you to make your fellow colleagues cry, but I do want us to not overcompartmentalize and overprofessionalize the ways in which when you get close to other people, and you are vulnerable, like we’ve been talking about, and you share parts of your life, of course, your heart is going to be ripped when these things happen, and we have to say various versions of goodbyes.

I like when we show up with that authenticity, vulnerability, to really care, and that’s really the only way that that song’s ever going to make us cry as much as it’s [laughs] making my colleagues cry.

[00:40:30] Rob: I’ve just downloaded both of those. Thank you for those recommendations. They’re timely for me.

[00:40:35] Bonni: You’re always so good at writing to me over all these months that we’ve known each other. I suspect I’ll hear from you [laughs] when you have a chance to listen because they’re really, really good. I will also say too that the For Good, those of you that might want to make a video, about the minute mark of that song is when it starts to go in and really get those lyrics in there. All right, Bonnie, I know you have something to recommend today as well.

[00:41:02] Bonnie: Yes. Well, I just read this again today when I was thinking about teamwork and collaboration. Simon Sinek said, “A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.” If you can find ways to help your students trust you and trust each other, that might mean less competition and more collaboration.

[00:41:23] Bonni: Oh, thank you so much, Bonnie. That’s beautiful. All right. Rob, what do you have to recommend for us today?

[00:41:29] Rob: Two quick recommendations, A book by Shawn Achor called Big Potential, which is the kind of book I enjoy because he draws on and summarizes a bunch of research, including research he’s done himself. He’s not just a positive psychology guy, but calls himself an expert in positive systems psychology. How do we create infrastructure that can help improve everyone’s wellness?

I was intrigued by much of what he shared. My second one is just a practical tip I was thinking of this morning as I was running and listening to your podcast. It’s to take a picture in nature every day. Whether it’s an ant on the sidewalk, or an ant in your apartment, or a flower that’s just beginning to grow this morning. I got a very short video of a heron taking off from a pond. The exercise gets you out into nature and gets your head out of your book or whatever, and helps you notice the beautiful world around you.

[00:42:23] Bonni: Bonnie and Rob, thank you so much for coming on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Of course, thanks also to your co-author, Steve, for being here in spirit and for his ways in which he’s been emblematic of the kinds of building of community that we’ve been talking about today.

[00:42:42] Bonnie: Thank you.

[00:42:42] Rob: Thanks so much.

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[00:42:46] Bonni: 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’ve been listening for a while and have yet to sign up for the weekly updates, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

What that will result in is emails coming in once a week with the latest episode’s show notes, as well as some other resources that don’t show up in the regular podcast episodes. I would encourage you to head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Also, thank you so much for being a part of the Teaching in Higher Ed community, and we’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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[00:43:45] [END OF AUDIO]

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.