[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 355 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, Coffee, Community, and Curriculum.

[00:00:11] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:20] 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.

In today’s episode, I’m showcasing some of the top takeaways and insights from a new online learning community called The Coffee Shop. This is a home-brewed initiative. See what I did there? Founded by five Florida faculty developers, who came together out of a shared interest in building on and refining their instructional practices.

In monthly sessions, they featured guests who present on a technique, or tool, or strategy that they’re using in the classroom, as well as, some advice on how to implement it. Today’s guests are Jodi Robson, director of the Institute for Academic Excellence at Indian River State College, Michelle Levine, district director of faculty development at Broward College, and Barbara Rodriguez who’s regional director for academic programs at ACUE.

Today’s guests were introduced to me through my partnership with the Association of College and University Educators or ACUE. ACUEs courses and community sites feature many of teaching and learning top experts, faculty developers, and practitioners. ACUEs courses and community sites feature many of teaching and learning top experts, faculty developers, and practitioners.

Jodi, Barbara, and Michelle welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:14] Jodi Robson: Thank you.

[00:02:15] Barbara Rodriguez: Thanks.

[00:02:16] Michelle Levine: Thank you.

[00:02:18] Bonni: The title of today’s episode is Coffee, Community, and Curriculum. Let’s get real about the coffee. Which one of you actually is a coffee drinker among you?

[00:02:30] Barbara: I acknowledge– this is Barbara. I love coffee. I had six cups today.

[00:02:35] Bonni: All right. We have one vivid coffee lover and the rest of us just join her in her appreciation but are not actually coffee drinkers, but we’re just the spirit of coffee and what coffee brings about. I’m excited about today’s conversation. We are looking at what happens with learning, or I should say what happened in your cases with learning.

When a formal program ends like the one that you participated in through ACUE, and how to extend that learning, how to share it with others, how to wrestle it.

I always think it’s so interesting with something like teaching. We talk about it at the beginning of every episode that teaching is both an art and a science. If you really believe that, you know that it’s not about reading a book, taking a class. I want to hear before we go into talking about some specific approaches that we can use as educators. I’d just love to hear a little bit from you, one way that you approach your own lifelong learning. Jodi, would you tell us what your– Again, I know there’s many ways, but what is one way that you approach your lifelong learning?

[00:03:47] Jodi: I love to go ahead and keep my finger on the pass-through box and reading different boxes that relate to best practices for teaching.

[00:03:56] Bonni: Yes, excellent. I’m also a reader although I feel like sometimes I have to put that in past tense I go in spats. You really have to discipline yourself a little bit to do that. Do you have any technique that you use to keep getting your nose back in the books?

[00:04:10] Jodi: Yes. I offer regular book clubs and we’re always switching up our boxes so I definitely need to keep my finger on the poll.

[00:04:18] Bonni: Book clubs make such a difference. We run a few at my institution as well, and I’ll tell you what, having a podcast where you’re going to interview an author another way to keep your nose in the book. All right Barbara, how about you? What’s one way that you approach your lifelong learning?

[00:04:35] Barbara: I acknowledge after the dissertation, I don’t read as much as I should, so I do podcasts. Bonni, yours is one of the ones I listen to. I do fitness podcasts, teaching and learning podcast. Any type of podcast, I’m always listening. I love them.

[00:04:50] Bonni: Do you mind sharing what app you use to listen to podcasts?

[00:04:53] Barbara: Spotify is where I listen to my podcasts.

[00:04:57] Bonni: That seems to be a real growing audience. I remember early on as Spotify was just getting into podcasting, we had to go through a little bit of a rigmarole to get ourselves set up there, but now it’s just seamless and so nice to be able to extend it out to that audience. Are you also a music lover?

[00:05:15] Barbara: I am. I love music and all types of genres. I just have a list of my favorite songs that I listen to through Spotify. It’s pretty awesome.

[00:05:25] Bonni: You got one go to. You got your music, you got your podcast all in one place. That’s so great.

[00:05:31] Barbara: Exactly.

[00:05:31] Bonni: Michelle, how about for you? What’s one way that you approach your lifelong learning?

[00:05:36] Michelle: I also love to read and listen to podcasts, but actually what has been a game-changer for me is Audible. One thing my eyesight is going. One of the benefits of getting older, but also I have three small children and they don’t always allow me to just sit and enjoy some reading, so any chance that I have, whether I’m taking a walk or driving in my car, I’m able to listen to Audible.

It’s been a game-changer for me in terms of professional development, personal development, and just…

[00:06:09] Bonni: I have that eyesight thing too as I have aged, so bumping up the font size and all of that. Isn’t it great that we can? I really do have to go back. This would be such a simple experiment for me to do. I’m convinced at this point that the publishers have shrunk down the font sizes since I was reading books, but I should really go gauge and see if that’s actually accurate or not.

It’s so generous the publishers will send me books that I didn’t ask for, but it’s at Christmas, 12 months a year kind of thing, and I though go, “Oh, gosh, I may have to get that magnifying glass up out on my font to be able to read this.” I do love the digital options to be able to bump it up and then things like Audible. Here’s my question though Michelle, would you express to me. I read this book.

If you listened to it on Audible, would you express it that way?

[00:07:03] Michelle: Oh, it’s pretty that you said that. A lot of times I would catch myself, so I will start out by saying, “Oh, I read such and such,” but then I will change it over to I listened to. Actually, I find sometimes that it is a much richer experience listening to it if it’s the author themselves who’s telling the story.

[00:07:21] Bonni: Isn’t that so powerful. I always want to know that too. There was a really good book that’s been recommended by me and by many others on the podcast called Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom. I read it first and then someone else recommended it on the show who had listened to it on Audible, and I said, “Is it her reading it?” I wanted to just go back if she said, “It really is.”

So many are the times when you can actually hear the author read their own words. I don’t really listen to a lot of audiobooks, but I don’t generally get as excited about listening to them if it’s not going to be the author themselves. I realized there’s exceptions to that, but it’s really cool when you can hear them read their own words.

[00:08:00] Michelle: Yes, for sure. There is one book that I don’t believe is the author that– It’s called Seriously and it’s phenomenal. I love the person who narrates. Her voice is just absolutely beautiful.

[00:08:12] Bonni: I know there are some cases where they’ll even take on the characters and the accents everything. [crosstalk] That’s really cool. All right. We are here today to talk about three approaches, but there are so many more that we could go learn more about if we get inspired by today’s episode that came out of something called The Coffee Shop. Jodi, could you tell us a little bit about The Coffee Shop?

[00:08:36] Jodi: My background is elementary education, so I come out of this teaching background. I just feel that in the field of education in general, that we work on our silos and I thought after this experience with ACUE, there were so many great perspectives shared and feedback in these communities that you had when you did these cohorts, that I wanted to continue that conversation and I kept trying to figure out, how can I do this? How can I get people to come across from different disciplines?

Then also I had this aha moment over the summer and I reached out to Barbara Rodriguez with ACUE and I said, “Could you connect me with some other folks in the state of Florida that have also partnered with ACUE, and can we come together to create this opportunity? I feel strongly that I think we do things great on our own, but I think we’re better together. I think this is a great opportunity to work smarter not harder.”

She jumped right on it and I have to say that I reached out to– there’s five of us, so is Barbara Rodriguez of the ACUE, who has really been a strong support, Michelle and myself, and then we have Dr. Brandon McIntire, he’s director of eLearning at Florida Gateway College. We have Margaret Shippey, and she is the director of faculty development and classroom engagement at Miami Dade College. Then we have Steve Grosteffon, who is the professor of mathematics at Santa Fe College.

I reached out to these guys on a Saturday about this idea of coming together to support each other, but also faculty across the state, and they jumped on it right away. We had this idea, and we just thought it would be great to work together to provide these opportunities to our faculty. We started with just our institutions. We’ve opened it up to anyone throughout the country to go ahead and join us. It’s been a great opportunity for all of us to bounce ideas off of each other.

[00:10:25] Bonni: We are going to be talking about three approaches today, but I also just want to remind what Jodi just said, there’s a whole library of approaches. If you like the three techniques that you hear, we’re going to have links for you in the show notes to go have access to a lot more. Jodi, let’s begin with Entrance Tickets. Could you tell us what they are and how we might go about using them in our teaching?

[00:10:50] Jodi: Yes. This was a presentation that was provided by Professor Daymaris Alvarez, and she put her own twist on the Exit Ticket. Instead of the exit and the end of the class, she put this twist on it to do this Entrance Ticket. What I really love about it is, she’s got a finger on the pulse of her students at the start of the semester.

One of the things that Daymaris Alvarez shares with her session is that in talking with faculty members, they recognize halfway through the semester that students aren’t going to be successful. At this point, it’s too late. She shared with us a faculty member, that’s a math instructor and her students did not have the funds to purchase the graphing calculator.

Now at this point, there’s nothing they can do to go ahead and really support that student as best as possible. It really is important to go ahead and find out early on in the semester, what is it that our students need in order to be successful? Maybe a twist to go ahead and check it that midway point is to maybe add, and this would be my own little version of twisting this exit ticket to the entrance ticket to now adding like an intermission ticket and checking, has anything changed with our students? Is there some other need that they might have to help them to be successful in the class at this point in time? We have a little clip here, and she talks about how she sets it up and a little bit of what I just shared.

[00:12:12] Daymaris Alvarez: How have I implemented this ticket and how can you implement it? Currently, because I’m doing virtual learning, I’m synchronous. In other words, again, I meet with my students via either Zoom, Blackboard, whatever platform that we use, I have created an assignment on the learning platform. This is how I put my ticket for the assignment, I say, “Please, write down three things that would help you be successful in the course. Please note that it can be anything, this can include childcare, let’s say you cannot come to class because you have a child. Let me know that’s the case, it can be not being able to purchase the book. Please be honest, and make sure that it’s something that you truly need. Keep in mind that other students cannot see your entry ticket. This is between you and me. Again, that privacy is so important.”

[00:13:05] Bonni: Thank you so much, Jodi, for sharing about entrance tickets, and for sharing that clip with us. Our next approach is physical and mental attendance. Michelle, what can you tell us about the importance of physical and mental attendance and a little bit about how it’s thought of in the next clip that we’re going to be sharing?

[00:13:27] Michelle: … is actually from Professor Marie Trabbic from Santa Fe College. Her approach is giving what she calls attendance assessments. These attendance assessments are intended to ensure as you said, both physical and mental attendance. This has been a particular issue, especially since we’ve gotten remote. A lot of times, and I know I experienced this personally. We’ll be on a Zoom session, our students are there in our gallery view, but they’re not sharing their camera. There’s no way to really know that they are physically attending much less mentally attending.

What she does is, she gives these attendance assessments right after each class, they’re based directly on the lecture. She’ll prepare about 70% of it ahead of time, and then maybe three questions out of the 10 will be specific to the content that was presented in that particular lesson. What she found is that it’s really helped with having students share their cameras, sense of belonging, having them really attend both physically and mentally. They’re there with her and she’s really seen a difference in the engagement from her students from the attendances.

Now we’re going to share a clip from The Coffee Shop.

[00:14:47] Marie Trabbic: The assessments include 10 questions, and they’re in the format of multiple-choice, essay, fill in the blank, true, false, matching, and they’re not timed again and the students are permitted to use resources. Again, the resources can include the recorded mini-lectures, links provided during class, if they wrote this information down, I don’t provide it within the assessments, I use eBooks so they can use their eBook research and other sources again.

The focus is on several questions that cannot be researched, what our discussion actually entailed. Then students can take these assessments twice with their highest score recorded for their grade. They do accumulate to 5% of the grade. Achieving this mental attendance, it’s challenging, and it’s critical in all classes. It’s especially difficult to achieve this mental attendance in the hybrid learning environment.

[00:15:44] Bonni: Oh, it was so good to hear from Marie. Michelle, thanks for sharing that clip and sharing a little bit about physical and mental attendance. One thing I’m finding is we just tend to think about that this only happens in online classes, and with all the emergency remote teaching that’s been going on. This is present in any space where learning is taking place. What a great way that we can think about approaching this.

All right, our last technique, something tangible that people can take away. Barbara is going to tell us a little bit about and this one is in the area of video assessments.

[00:16:22] Barbara: Our barista is Emily Renschler. This video clip resonated with me, because I teach online, I’ve been teaching online for, I don’t want to disclose how long it’s been, even before the pandemic, and I do discussion boards and had issues with engagement and worked on a rubric to improve that. What I also noticed was, reading all the texts sometimes is just draining, not only for me as the faculty member but the students.

Emily did this video assessment. She talks about how she allows students to use videos in lieu of text. Because in her assignment, she would say to students, “I want you to post X number of words.” Students struggled. She said, “What if I allow them to post video in lieu of text?” She goes through in this clip about how she uses the video assessment, and how she’s realized when she sees the transcript because she has the students upload to YouTube, that she’s done the word count, and they’re exceeding the word count that they would have normally had, and how that’s become more interactive in the discussion based on the video.

It just for me still, as a faculty member, let me know that there are other ways to use the video versus the introduction when you start the class, because I use Flipgrid, and I’ve tried to be more dynamic. It’s really nice to see her do this assessment piece with the video. What I also like about this clip, is she talks through some things about accessibility, and what if students can’t hear with their technology issues. She accommodates for that. That’s what we really need to do when we have students, who may not be able to have the technology for the video or don’t want to show their pictures and things like that. Let’s watch this short clip.

[00:18:24] Emily Renschler: This semester, I reworked this to include a video component. What I asked the students to do was, I asked them to actually have their book with them. They just made a quick video and everything that they would have said in the discussion board they shared. They were actually able to open their book and share that, X, Y, Z, is the good criteria. Here’s where I found it in my book.

What I noticed is when I downloaded their transcripts of what they had said in their video post, I had 1,000 words, 2,000 words, which is much more in-depth than anything I used to get on the discussion boards. It was a lot more fun to grade. I actually felt their passion when they were talking about these books.

[00:19:07] Bonni: Thank you for introducing us to Emily. I am really struck that not only can we use it in context, like she described, but also just this idea that when we give people other ways to communicate, it can help with fully utilizing the communication models. You think about there’s always the sender and the receiver and some encoding has to take place at all this and if what I’m being asked to do, I’m thinking of a recent situation, working with a doctoral student who just wasn’t comfortable with academic writing, you get people they haven’t maybe done that style of academic writing perhaps ever or perhaps it’s been more than a decade or even longer than that.

I was trying to help him see that if you just try to go from academic writing to academic writing, sometimes you’re missing that communication model that can take place. You have to do that encoding, which to me I was suggesting make it casual, make it informal. He said, “Oh, I just feel so much comfortable writing conversations.” I said, “Great.” Start with that. Even if you want to speak it out loud and that’s going to help you translate because I think sometimes we get so intimidated and we think we have to write this fancy-fancy stuff and then read the fancy-fancy stuff and not realizing that actually so many of us do the teach-it-to-me or tell-it-to-me like I’m an eight-year-old.

I just think that’s such a good way to tell if someone, including myself, really understands something. Our kids are still pretty young though their vocabularies continue to just astound me, but they’ll ask me what does a word mean? Oh my gosh. Some of them just stump me to know like how do you explain that word. I just think it’s such a good thing for us to be connecting with that beginner’s mind and also giving learners other alternatives for communicating what they’re learning and that’s such a great example.

[00:21:07] Barbara: I think so too.

[00:21:09] Michelle: Also I love how she talks about how their personalities come out in the videos.

[00:21:13] Bonni: So true. That’s that way to create more of that sense of connection, which is just so essential. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. My recommendation is I suggest that everyone go visit The Coffee Shop YouTube channel, and we’re going to have a link to it in the show notes and I will admit, I had to be careful. I wanted to watch every single one. They’re just really rich ways to continue to pursue our own learning about teaching. I just thank each one of you for your contributions to making this possible and the ways in which you’ve shared it in such public ways.

That is my recommendation for today. I’m going to pass it over to Jodi for yours.

[00:22:00] Jodi: Thanks, Bonni. We definitely appreciate you recommending The Coffee Shop and we’re moving to hopefully espresso shop. So we’ll have that later too. My recommendation is I really encourage folks to go ahead and if you’re a faculty developer to reach out to somebody at another institution and see how you can partner up and support each other and support the faculty at your institution with some type of cross-collaboration. I think that’s a great way to go ahead and just tap into individuals at other institutions. Thank you.

[00:22:30] Bonni: How about you, Barbara? What do you have to recommend today?

[00:22:33] Barbara: Instead of a podcast, I’m just going to share, I binge-watched Ginny & Georgia on Netflix. I’m going to recommend that for anyone wanting fluff and not wanting to use your brain, just need a downtime. Go watch that. It’s very cute and delightful.

[00:22:53] Bonni: Barbara, I love shows like that just to take us away. You know that commercial, some you might not remember this, but I certainly do. The Calgon take me away. Am I saying it right? I was never like a Calgon take me away person. I’m a like Netflix take me away person. Thank you so much. I’m not familiar with that one so I’ll have to check it out. Can you give us a little snippet without giving too much away?

[00:23:20] Barbara: Sure. It is just a single mom trying to make the best with two kids and one’s a teenager going through the struggles of teenagehood.

[00:23:30] Bonni: Oh, it sounds so good. So good. All right, Michelle, how about, what do you have to recommend for us today?

[00:23:36] Michelle: Well, I said that I’m an Audible fan, so I am going to recommend an excellent book that I just listened to on Audible recently, that’s actually our college read. I listened to it before I even knew it was our college read. I’m excited to start having conversations with other people about this book. It’s called Born A Crime. It’s written by Trevor Noah and he grew up in pre and post-apartheid in South Africa and it’s his experience as a biracial boy growing up and then becoming a teenager. He’s a comedian just so you know. It’s not immaterial, but there’s also so many funny parts. I’ve never laughed and cried so much simultaneously back and forth, but it’s just excellent.

[00:24:18] Bonni: Am I safe to assume he reads his own book in this case?

[00:24:22] Michelle: He does and that’s where I feel like it’s such a better experience. I’m recommending not just the book, but to listen to it on Audible.

[00:24:30] Bonni: Well, I have seen that book so many times and I think that would be one that I really would enjoy to download on Audible. It scares me a little bit though because I’m so far behind on podcasts. My phone, in fact, this morning said, “Are you sure you really want to download all these to your phones?” This collectively has taken up so much room. They erase off my phone after I’ve listened to them so that just shows you the queue is getting even more full. I’ve never gotten that error message before so that’s not a good sign, but it really does sound so good.

Thanks to all three of you for your recommendations. Jodi, for inspiring us to reach out to other collaborators. Barbara, for Ginny & Georgia, that recommendation, I can tell you, I got to get in there because I need something to fill the gap of when I just finished up a show and this will be a good one. Then Michelle Born A Crime read by Trevor Noah on Audible. Thanks again to all three of you just for your contributions. I’m excited because I have even more exploration I can do on The Coffee Shop and just inviting other people to do the same. Thanks so much for being on the show.

[00:25:37] Michelle: Thank you so much, Bonni. It has been such an absolute pleasure working with this team and coming together, it’s really helped us as faculty developers engage ourselves in a sense of belonging with each other.

[00:25:50] Barbara: I’m just so glad that you’re able to model some of the teaching practices that you’ve learned in the course through The Coffee Shop.

[00:25:58] Jodi: Yes, it has been a fabulous opportunity to be able to collaborate with faculty developers across the state and support me and all of us with what we’re doing with faculty.

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[00:26:11] Bonni: Thanks once again, to Jodi Robson, Michelle Levine, and Barbara Rodriguez for joining me for today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I love that I get to be a part of your coffee shop, even though I don’t drink coffee and I once again, encourage everyone to head on over and check out that resource. Thanks to all of you for listening to Teaching in Higher Ed. If you have yet to sign up for our weekly update, it was revised in January. I’m getting lots of compliments on it being a even more helpful resource. Head on over teachinginhigherread.com/subscribe.

Thanks again for listening and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

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.