Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on Episode 104 of Teaching in Higher Ed Dave Stachowiak and I answer listener questions and also get some feedback and advice from parts of the Teaching in Higher Ed community.

Production Credit: [00:00:14] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:24] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is 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 increase our personal productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:51] It’s episode 104 and I invite back to the show Dave Stachowiak. If you haven’t been listening for a while his last name may sound familiar to you, I am married to him. And I always joke when we are at the grocery store that people say they try to pronounce the last name by looking at the receipt Thank you Mrs.. And one time someone called me Mrs. Sasquatch and I always say that’s true love baby to have married into that last name.

Dave: [00:01:18] Yeah well he have nowhere to go but up once you’ve married into the Sasquatch clan.

Bonni: [00:01:23] Yes and it brings up all these well why did you decide to take his last name and it’s just the whole.

Dave: [00:01:28] We did have a chat about that.

Bonni: [00:01:30] I thought you were going to take my last name for a while and it turned out you were kidding and I didn’t know it.

Dave: [00:01:36] I do remember I do remember us having a conversation about that.

Bonni: [00:01:39] I think you weren’t actually kidding I think you changed your mind but that’s a story for another day. Today we are on the show because there’s actually been a number of questions that have come up through different means whether this was posting on the comments section of various episodes or through e-mail or even through the new Teaching in Higher Ed Slack channel and I’m excited about the Slack channel by the way there are a bunch of questions that come in and it’s so fun to see the way people are engaging there.

Bonni: [00:02:06] It’s it’s just it’s kind of has a different feel than Twitter because people seem to be a little bit more open about admitting areas of failure and areas of struggle and it’s just been a great community to be a part of so anyone who wants to join that by the way just send me an email and let me know what your email address is that you use for Slack and I’d be happy to add you in the quickest way to send me an email is to go to teachinginhighered.com/feedback because that comes right into my inbox.

Bonni: [00:02:33] And a lot of the questions today Dave are are just really the beginning of some conversations I’ve been holding them in a queue now and realizing we’re not going to be able to address them as fully as I know either one of us might like to but to me we can start the conversation and recognize that there’s more to be said about a subject.

Bonni: [00:02:50] And this starts with this first question which I did take this person’s name out because this one came over e-mail and I wasn’t certain I had the ability to share the person’s name so we just left it off. But if you want to go ahead and read the message from this individual.

Dave: [00:03:05] “Hi Bonni. I just want to thank you so much for your wonderful podcast. It is so great to hear from you and all your amazing guests who take university teaching seriously and work hard at it. It fills a serious gap in the conversation about life the higher ed. Couldn’t agree more. I have been inspired by and implemented many of the ideas I’ve been exposed to video or podcasts or doing such important work. There is one topic I would really like to hear discussed in more depth. How do you actually translate an understanding of sympathy for students with disabilities emotional and family issues and other challenges integrating slash evaluation. I’ve had issues in the past with for example students with anxiety who register for my presentation heavy language course and then reveal that they are unable to do presentations. The disability office is often unhelpful with actual solutions for how to accommodate their challenges what it means that they cannot do the required assignments and I am left in the awkward situation of having to pass students who did not having to pass students who did not master the skills of my course that they’re seeking to develop. I would love some insight on this.”

Bonni: [00:04:07] I am so appreciative that there are two parts to your question. I want to hone in on the first part of your question which you said how do I have more of an understanding and sympathy for students with disabilities. And I love that you started your question that way. It shows me that this to you is somewhat of an ethical thing to treat all of our students with the dignity and the respect that they deserve and just the ability to demonstrate their own skills and ability to learn in different ways so I’m just happy you started that way.

Bonni: [00:04:45] You used the word sympathy and I’m not sure if you are necessarily aware of the difference between sympathy and empathy. I was educated about it some time ago and always liked to know the difference. Empathy is when I can really appreciate where you might be coming from in a given situation because I’ve experienced something similar.

Bonni: [00:05:06] And just to give an example. Dave and I. We suffered from infertility for many years before being able to have children. And so if we ever meet other couples that are trying to have start a family in that way we have empathy. It doesn’t mean we know exactly how they feel but we kind of have have a. I was going to say dipped out toe but it was a lot more than our toe.. in that particular pool.

Bonni: [00:05:32] That’s empathy and then sympathy is where we definitely have feelings of sorrow for the other person’s behalf but it’s a little bit harder for us to be able to necessarily relate because we haven’t experienced it. And one one tool and I’ll put a link to this in the show you’ll be at teachinginhighered.com/104 was a Web site that simulates what it is like to have dyslexia and that was really powerful to go up and see what could actually to put on literally a pair of lenses and say what would it be like to be asked a page if I was dyslexic. I loved that.

Bonni: [00:06:14] And so the more that we can start to there with trying to understand another person’s context and your question you’re asking about disability. But imagine all of the different realms that we would benefit as educators by being more aware of context and David I shared on a previous episode. Both of us not ever having difficulty pain for textbooks ourselves when we were in college and then just now to have more sympathy for people that do. And to try to put into practice ways that we might be more sympathetic and still be good educators giving good quality materials. But with that in the corner of our minds or maybe in the center of our minds too.

Bonni: [00:06:54] Anyway I’m glad that you started with that and that’s one of the reasons why I want this just to be the start of a conversation today and I was fortunate enough to get to go for a walk the other day on beautiful Newport Beach back bay with my friend and former guest of the show Jeff Hittenberger and he told me about this book called Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. And I have not read it yet so I am not recommending it because I always have this thing I’m not going to recommend something if I haven’t read it yet.

Bonni: [00:07:24] But since he mentioned it to me I’ve actually seen it in a number of other places as well and he just shared about how powerful it was for him to look at diversity through the lens of people somewhere on the autism spectrum and that was really fun for me to see and so I’ve started to get some different possible guests and some people that have some expertise in this area to protect perhaps come in and contribute to the show and all of that to be said. So that’s the first part of it just having sympathy, having empathy and that we start there.

Bonni: [00:07:58] The second half of your question is really around the expectations though if you are teaching a presentations course and someone goes through your class and doesn’t present they have not achieved the learning outcomes for that course. And as harsh as this might sound for me to say this they shouldn’t pass the class because that it would show on their transcript. I took presentations one would mean is this such a such an elementary foundational thing you would assume and I would hope rightfully so that that means you have a skill to be able to present. And I thought a lot about this I used to teach one unit business communications class. It was not an extensive one but for a while there they were just packing it and it was a one unit class and they had fifty four students in there and Im going Oh come on.

Bonni: [00:08:50] And the the what got brought back to me was well you should just have them make videos. No making a video is not the same skill as presenting in a business context in front of a group of people. And if youd like to make a class that one of the learning outcomes is to make a video of one’s self presenting then we could do that but I would suggest that our students are really remiss in not getting the skill of presenting in what will be much more normal in a business context so thats sorry my my little rant there, watching Dave’s face go mmmmm. It’s obviously something I feel very strongly about.

Bonni: [00:09:30] And so what is ideally supposed to happen. Is that someone who works in the field of disability services is able to come in and partner with us and with this learner to be able to discover what is called an accommodation and accommodation is not a excuse to not perform a particular skill but it is some way where something is altered to allow them to demonstrate a skill. And of course the classic example that comes up in my background in human resources would be someone who has some type of a visual impairment and you get them a special screen that has is able to be magnified so that it accommodates for their visual impairment.

Bonni: [00:10:23] And when we think about the presentation that is specific to your question presentations what kinds of accommodations might be needed for someone to give presentations and having a professional to have some kind of a dialogue with and and a dialogue with students as well. I feel like I went on maybe even longer than I had planned on your question but thank you so much for e-mailing it and I know Dave has a few thoughts as well but you have now just prompted me to prioritize future conversations around this so we can all keep getting better at doing this.

Dave: [00:10:56] Well in a lot of ways I feel very ill equipped to answer this question because I’ve not had a lot of these come up in my adjunct teaching Bonni, or at least no one’s approached me with it. And I think that’s the kind of thing or the tendency for us for I think a lot of us is to do what’s mentioned in the in the email here is too sometimes we see that accommodation or we’re like OK how am I going to handle this.

Dave: [00:11:20] And maybe someone gets a passing grade that shouldn’t have gotten it. And I mean the this isn’t the best analogy Bonni but the best thing I can think of is when I’ve run into situations in classes before and someone is really struggling with understanding how to write well and to put original ideas together and not just copy verbatim from a source search and I use quotations well and to really write well it is so easy it and the temptation is so easy at least from a family standpoint to just kind of let that go of like OK you know yeah you just got to be in the paper you have to see in the paper and it wasn’t that good.

Dave: [00:11:57] It’s a lot harder and takes way more time and energy to sit down with that student and to have a conversation about the writing style and to talk about some of the assumptions or make it in writing and really start to enter the learning space. How can we help you to become a better writer that’s going to serve you throughout the rest your academic career and more importantly a professional career in what you’re going to do.

Dave: [00:12:18] And as someone who has done that on a number of occasions it takes a lot of time and it’s hard. Those are hard conversations to have. And it’s even now I’m so tempted like when I see that in a paper I’m like it’s so easy just to let it go. But I’m almost always so grateful when I’ve taken the time to really figure out how can I work with this person to help them meet the standard they want to meet and and spend the time and the energy that it’s going to take for us to get on the same page to work together in partnership to get there.

Dave: [00:12:54] And I think about that through the lens of the question of disability too. I think it’s easy to look at it as a you know an either or. And if you can if we can all work to get in partnership with our students and we’re in this together you know there are going to be a certain subset students are going to take a bunch. That if we take the time to mentor and really coach in that way will really serve them so well.

Dave: [00:13:17] And so I’m so curious what some of the other members of the community I met with people who are part of the teach heard community who have studied disabilities studies as their career. I’m really curious to hear some of the feedback on this too and as a start to the conversation it’ll be will be fun to see you know what we can learn and navigate this better.

Bonni: [00:13:34] Speaking of follow up from prior episodes, on Episode 42 that’s quite awhile ago I was talking about that I wished I had some way for students online to be able to look at if they got this grade on the final exam then what would their grade wind up being or if their attendance grades thought that they could fill in some of the gaps and better project out what their future grade was going to be.

Bonni: [00:14:00] And I talked about that in Microsoft Excel there’s a feature like this called Scenario Manager and you could figure if you’re looking at maybe three different houses and you wanted to see what your mortgage payment would be and your total overall payment. Over the course of your 20 or 30 years paying that off you could have a drop down menu that that’s at least one of the ways of displaying the Ccenario Manager data.

Bonni: [00:14:23] You can look at scenario one house one look at Scenario Two House two etc. etc. and Jennifer Loveland wrote in and said that there is such a thing and of course there’s such an things you’ve said Gee Ager… wait I can’t pronounce that. It’s like algebra but.

Dave: [00:14:41] Geogebra.

Bonni: [00:14:42] Geogebra. That sounds right. It’s a program designed for mathematics. It’s usually thought of. And by the way I’m reading Jennifer’s words now it’s usually thought of as a visual but it does have a spreadsheet mode. You can design a Geogebra. Oh my goodness. Say it.

Dave: [00:15:00] Geag- G. Let’s just spell it. G E O G E B R A. Geogebra. Geogebra.

Bonni: [00:15:06] Yeah.

Dave: [00:15:07] I like that .

Bonni: [00:15:07] Geogebra.

Dave: [00:15:08] I’m settling, I don’t know.

Bonni: [00:15:10] Actually on your computer and then upload it to the Geogebra tube where your students can access it. And she was kind enough to include a couple of links that we will include in the show notes. And Jennifer I’m just so glad that you were listening and thanks so much for writing that in. I loved hearing about a new tool that I haven’t heard of before.

Bonni: [00:15:30] Although I do have good news on this because we are switching our institution is switching to a new learning management system called Canvas in the fall. It’s just this side. It’s all very nice. They have in their grade things students can go and basically do a scenario manager right there inside the learning management system and actually save them and save different variations of them and I’m so excited to have that start in in the fall. I cannot wait.

Dave: [00:15:58] Cool.

Bonni: [00:16:00] Our next question we actually have another guest instead of Dave. We will be joined by Julie who is a colleague of mine and actually a colleague of yours a former colleague how we even describe this.

Dave: [00:16:13] I’m a retired adjunct pharmacy… I’m a retired adjunct nursing professor at the moment.

Bonni: [00:16:20] Yes. And she has the most wonderful Fourth of July parties every single year that the kids just absolutely love attending. And so she’s going to be answering our next question with me and Dave you’ll be coming back in just a minute.

Bonni: [00:16:34] Another question that we received was from John and I really thought that I needed to get some help to answer John’s question. In addition to Dave despite Dave having been a adjunct professor of nursing. Thought we’d bring in the real deal the big guns and that is my colleague Julie Wilson. Julie welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Julie: [00:16:54] Oh thank you.

Bonni: [00:16:55] I thought I’d share a little bit about your background you have a doctorate of Nursing Practice and get a Masters of Science in Nursing and a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing and you are a Board Certified Family Nurse Practitioner.

Julie: [00:17:10] Yes.

Bonni: [00:17:11] And since John’s question has to do with your field I thought you’d bring I’d bring you on but also to have people keep listening who maybe aren’t in the nursing profession. A lot of the advice that you’ll be given can apply in a broader context too so here’s what John wrote in and asked.

Bonni: [00:17:25] “I just started an adjunct teaching position and came across your podcast. It has really helped me as I make the transition from a clinical nurse manager to a teacher. Thank you as I was reading your web site. I realized I used to listen to your husband’s podcast when I became a nurse manager. Small world. I am thinking of going back to school next year to get my doctorate degree doctoral degree. Any advice on how to prepare for that next step in academic and professional development.

Bonni: [00:17:53] And Julia I know you had a few thoughts on this. Tell me a little bit first about considering your goals.

Julie: [00:18:00] Well I think John you probably already research this but there is three directions you can go in nursing and that there is an Ed.D. which is educational focus. There’s When you get on in nursing education. A Ph.D. which is more research focused and then there’s the doctor nursing practice which is kind of a blend of clinical organizational economic informatics and develop leadership skills as well.

Julie: [00:18:28] I was wondering if you are more focused on continuing in your clinical management degree if you want to have your goal to be more of a nurse educator or you probably have strong clinical skills already if you want to be more of a clinician and pass on those critical skills as a clinical nurse educator. So first of all you have to consider your goals and what your long term outcome would be.

Bonni: [00:18:57] One of the things I would really advise is to go on the Linked In and look at profiles or even on the various institutions Web site if you want to continue your teaching focus and look at what specific degrees those people have earned and really have those conversations. I can say that I know now way more than I did when I started my own program about some of these distinctions and if you don’t know one in advance it can really hinder you and you’re making such a big investment of time and money. I cannot emphasize this enough along with Julie and I know your second piece of advice is to choose the type of program that year that you’re going to go into and kind of how that’s going to work in your life. What are your thoughts on this one.

Julie: [00:19:40] Well there’s two obviously everyone knows that there is an online focus on that is very popular with people with families and have full time jobs like being a clinical manager and there’s pros and cons with having an online program versus an in class program because there’s technology being so advanced right now there is a lot of asynchronous ability to schedule your lectures and watch them on your own time. And if it does have to decide what kind of a learner you are if you would like to hear if you’re very auditory and you really like to have the interaction face to face that is one of the benefits of being actually in class.

Julie: [00:20:23] I know that some people really like being one to one and being in a classroom situation as far as developing collegiality with peers and also getting a chance to network for future positions in that and that face to face in some people’s view is a real good benefit versus online which can develop two relationships absolutely can develop that way as well you just have to decide what works best for you and how you best learn. And also the speed and how fast you want to graduate.

Bonni: [00:20:57] It’s fun to see so many programs these days too that are experimenting with more hybrid models and some of the other types of approaches to learning is just fun and definitely doing your research and talking to other people on the program will be a big help. The third thing was actually my big role in brushing up your technology skills is always my thing. If you’re thinking about going to get your doctoral degree.

Bonni: [00:21:21] Julie I know you know this I teach a few times a year in a doctoral program and I do tend to really be surprised at sometimes how people are just working harder than they need to with their technology and specifically around the area of wordprocessing since any kind of a program like this you’ll be writing a lot of research papers and it’s just hard when you have to fight with your word processor all the time and there’s a web site called Lynda.com although there is a lot of Web sites like this Lynda.com as with an L Y N D A.

Bonni: [00:21:52] And they have tutorials on various word processors including Microsoft Word and just getting it to do the work for you is going to really make a huge timesaving difference over the long haul of your program and then getting to know a good references manager and I have tended to really be getting to know Zotero really well in fact I found out there’s an add in that I can cite references from my Zotero library on my wordpress blog which is very exciting. I talked about that in a recent episode. But the more we can get to know a good references manager and a word processor is really going to help tremendously in any kind of a doctoral program like this. And the other advice from you Julie as far as brushing up your technology skills.

Julie: [00:22:35] Yes there’s actually a program there’s several programs that you can purchase for a very reasonable that will automatically put your papers in APA format which we all know for nursing that’s how all private papers are required to be placed in. And you could actually just there’s also a default settings in Microsoft Word for formatting but learning that and making it easy for you it will save a lot of time I know Zotero. You can also have the references put in APA format automatically. So it saves a lot of time until you finally really get really good at knowing that form and it’s kind of nice when technology can do it for you.

Bonni: [00:23:22] One of the last pieces of advice I know you have is to start getting curious.

Julie: [00:23:27] Yes. Well when you are going to go for a doctorate degree no matter what focus either the Ph.D. or DNP you will have to have something in your mind that you would like to study and for any kind of interview they will usually ask what kind of research you would like to do for your capstone project or your dissertation. And so to have some things that are in your mind that you’ve always wanted to look into because you will be spending many many hours writing rewriting studying focusing reading on whatever focus that you are going to do. Think about what kind of thing you want to do it a practice change for example or something that would make a difference in the people you’re working with or just in nursing in general and choose that and then take it from there and have some kind of an idea get curious.

Bonni: [00:24:27] Julie thanks so much for answering John’s question and I hope this is just the start to many guest appearances from Julie Wilson on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Julie: [00:24:36] Thank you.

Bonni: [00:24:38] Thanks Julie for joining in on this episode and for answering that question. Our next question here has to do with the guest we had on James Lang talking about his book “Small Teaching” and Dave I know he had a question from Daniel as a follow up to that episode.

Dave: [00:24:56] Daniel says: “Thank you both for a great podcast on small teaching. Many departments spend the bulk of their attention on shrinking budgets and organizational issues. Are there smaller approaches to reclaiming teaching as a focus at levels above the classroom on campuses. This inner incremental approach resonates with me in my teaching since I don’t have the bandwidth to make large changes all at once as I become more involved in service. I’m wondering what I can bring from this approach into the larger context.”

Bonni: [00:25:23] Daniel thanks so much for your question. And I love that you’re starting small with this institutions can just it can just get overwhelming thinking about trying to even just change one single process let alone change rethink an entire approach to something. And I love that you would would be inspired so much by James Lang’s book and his work around small teaching to think about small leading.

Bonni: [00:25:49] I mean I what the analogy would be here. I have a couple of things that I. Well one thing I’ve tried and one thing I’m planning on trying from this whole framework of instead of trying to just change everything and just having this mammoth change doing little things and that is that I wanted. A few years back to just be more engaged with other people at the institution where I work around technology.

Bonni: [00:26:16] But without it being some formal thing we have whenever there’s a committee you have to get a charter for the committee and asked to go through the Senate and then you have this and then you turn in minutes. I mean just it’s a it’s a thing and this is meaning no disrespect to committees but for me I just wanted an informal personal learning community that we could get together and and really improve our own practice with teaching and particularly with using technology.

Bonni: [00:26:44] And so I put together I put out an invitation we are able to at our institution send out e-mails to the entire faculty. This would not work well at larger institutions but there might be ways for you to get the message out. But I sent out an e-mail to the whole faculty and said gosh I’m going to be starting a group and if you’d like to join me an email back and then I use a program called Doodle and Doodle is just the best way that I know of finding what would be a good time in common with a whole group of people. And I put out you know we could do Wednesday afternoons or we could do Monday afternoons or we could do it and they would be able to specify these times would work for me. These times would would not work for me. And they even have an option in there. Yeah…I could do it. I could do it if I had to they have like a “meh” answer that you could go and select.

Bonni: [00:27:36] And it’s just a great great way of getting people together. And this was a message that was sent out probably to maybe 75 or 80 people and we wound up not with one group but with two groups and we had I think somewhere around 13 or 14 people in one of the groups and 15 or 16 people and the other group. I was just expecting one group and before I knew it we just had this great collaboration where people would come together.

Bonni: [00:28:00] And the format that we used was that we would each go around the table and we would share one thing that had our attention in recent weeks having to do with technology. And then one challenge that we were having not even necessarily having to do with technology but just that we thought technology might be a solution for. But we forced ourselves not to solve that problem during that meeting.

Bonni: [00:28:23] And then what we would do is each meeting had one follow up from the prayer meeting where one of those people that had shared Oh this is a cool thing I found lately came and gave a longer demo. So we actually voted on it and said you know wow I’d love to hear from Julie more about that piece of technology that she recommended. And then she would come in and give like a 10 or 15 minute demo. And around that the next time.

Bonni: [00:28:47] And then we would pick one of those challenges to tackle and say gosh you know you’re having trouble finding a good time to meet with people that maybe you could trade doodle or something like that or at least we could have them tracked and knowing that people were looking for solutions around this kind of thing it was really cool.

Bonni: [00:29:02] And to me the reason why I think this might be an answer for you is just to start something informal is that it’s just doesn’t have the barriers that something else does but I’ll tell you that really had I don’t think it was the only I know it wasn’t the only contributor but I believe we have a different culture today in our institution around leveraging technology and our teaching than we did before those groups started gathering.

Bonni: [00:29:28] And it’s fun if I hadn’t set out to do that. I would have thought that was too hard to try to do but that really was an outcome of just a fundamental shift in our culture around that that I’m excited to say those groups really. I see now with what people have told me have have had an impact on and then I’m trying to do this a little bit now around our transition to canvas. I’m in a formal consulting role right now with my institution and will be likely wrapping that up here.

Bonni: [00:29:57] But I’m also getting ready to start using canvas myself in the fall when I go back to my regular teaching gig without that. And so I’ve decided I might just have weekly gatherings using zoom which is our institutions synchronous meeting tool and just inviting people hey if you want to drop in and we’ll kind of start out with the basics but drop in show what you’re doing with your canvas class because a lot of my colleagues are starting to build things. We could kind of have like the adult version of show and tell and then talk about any challenges that you’re having any questions and I won’t be able to answer all the questions but we certainly can at least start to track those and be tracking down answers for people to some kind of excited about trying that same approach but doing it in an online synchronous thing is a lot of us live a considerable distance from campus and are off campus for the summer.

Dave: [00:30:47] I have a few thoughts on this as well. Bonni, when I think about influencing an organization and one a book that has become very popular in business circles in entrepreneurial circles is called “The Lean Startup” by Eric Reis and you’ll often hear this referred to in some of the organizations out there that are doing are trying to build and scale and influence change.

Dave: [00:31:09] And the thing that I really like about this book is the concept that he talks about is a minimum viable product of rather than spending years building something and not really getting feedback on it has to do something that is functional and good and helpful to people but but not anything more than that and to get it out there and get people to start using it.

Dave: [00:31:30] And I really am finding that is in contrast to my how I normally approached life which is I think for a lot of us who have taught in the university world is to have things figured out to have them perfectly planned to get A’s on everything you do and if you really mess something up maybe you got an A-minus or B-plus on something but to really have thought through that really well and Ive just been reminded a lot more recently not only in the business conversations that are going on but also in in my own professional development is the importance of starting small to go to what James Lang had talked about with Bonni in that episode of our tendency is to want to do a lot to start an initiative restart a committee or start something big.

Dave: [00:32:19] And I just find that more often than not of picking one thing to do and have a small win come out of that gets the momentum going especially in an organization. And so its certainly I certainly pull inspiration from that and I’m by the way I struggle with that daily Daniel of like reminding myself like I don’t have this all planned out I’d like to do something to get started and so that would be my recommendation for you is to think of what is one thing that you could potentially get a little bit of traction or like Mani was saying get a couple of people together informally and say hey you know the three of us are going to sit down and meet and have coffee once a month and we would talk about one thing were going to do to bring something into our class or a little more effectively this semester. And that may be the start of it if it never gets bigger than that that’s OK. That’s three of you doing something that you haven’t done before. That’s benefiting a whole lot of students.

Dave: [00:33:09] The other thing I was thinking of is the the book “Leading Change” by John Kotter who’s the probably the leading expert in the world on organizational change and influence and he has a whole part of the book and his change model of how to influence an organization is built around creating what he calls short term wins even if you’re working towards a larger objective and of trying to really change the culture change the the professionalism of teaching within the organization of do some things.

Dave: [00:33:39] First of all to get some traction get a short term win. Celebrate those short term wins and then as you get some of those under your belt Not only does the breakaway speed of the organization start to change and people there’s some momentum going forward but also what’s key about that is your confidence level in your ability to do something that influences change starts to change and and all of a sudden after you’ve seen three or four wins happen on a small scale then you can start to tackle what’s a medium when we could do. And you’ve got you’ve got more people involved. I’ve just found it to be such a smart way for me and for clients to handle trying to influence change within the organization. So and it goes right along with James, his message Bonni, of thinking what’s a small thing we can do. What’s a small change. And that’s so true for changing organizational culture and behavior too.

Bonni: [00:34:33] This is the point in this show where we each recommend something that’s had our attention in recent weeks and some of you might remember that I had a guest on the show Therese Huston and she shared in that episode about her book “Teaching What You Don’t Know” which has been an absolute treasure to me. But she has produced another treasure and it is a book I’d like to recommend today that I just finished reading. It’s called “How Women Decide: What’s True, What’s Not and What Strategies Spark the Best Choices.

Bonni: [00:35:03] And it is well written. It is based in research and is definitely counterintuitive to what I used to think about how women decide and what kinds of advice that I might give in the future to young women who are looking at gender differences in organizations and how they might really in some case one of the chapters that really stands out to me had to do with confidence and I’ve been a proponent for you know just behave confident and that that actually can be detrimental in some cases I’m not articulating it very well I’m trying not to give anything away and also not I won’t be able to do justice to the writing but I just suggest people check out the book “How Women Decide” and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

Dave: [00:35:48] On a completely unrelated topic to higher education since I already gave a couple of book recommendations. Bonni and I started we for years had used Mint to track our finances. I think it’s Mint.com sets and repining and Mint is great as far as organizing budgets and all that. We just have found it wasn’t quite exactly what we needed over time. And you know our budget wouldn’t always match up with reality and both of us have had different incomes over the years because of consulting projects and all that. And I think it’s great if you like your everything’s always the same every month.

Dave: [00:36:23] And we recently heard that it’s a service software service called You Need a Budget had come out with a web based version which is one of the reasons I never considered it previously is because it was a software and you couldn’t download transactions there was a whole bunch of limitations that fit in with their philosophy but just weren’t practical for us. And they have recently released a web based version of the software so in that way it’s similar to mint but we’ve really found that it’s been helpful as far as just how it handles budgets and categorizes and gives every dollar a job and it’s based on the envelope method which some people are familiar with as far as budgeting anyway.

Bonni: [00:37:00] But it doesn’t involve actual envelopes.

Dave: [00:37:02] There are no there are no envelopes involved.

Bonni: [00:37:03] And we know that would never work for me.

Dave: [00:37:06] So it’s all it’s all done digitally. But I think we found it to be really helpful as far as just how we were thinking about saving money and allocating money for certain things and it’s really it’s a good structure. It’s also very flexible and adaptable so I would recommend that if you’re looking for a good solution for managing your finances, You Need a Budget.

Bonni: [00:37:25] Dave thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed and I know we have a few reminders for people as we close the episode.

Dave: [00:37:33] Well thank you for having me. I’m always honored to be part of this community and part of the conversation.

Bonni: [00:37:39] One thing we want to remind you is if you have yet to sign up for the e-mail newsletter what would they get if they sign up to the e-mail updates.

Dave: [00:37:46] Your book you have a guide on technology in… higher education, e-learning? higher education? Yes.

Bonni: [00:37:56] This is going so well “19 Tools to Help Use Technology in Facilitating Learning and in Productivity”. And you can get that free guide and the weekly e-mail at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. And if you have yet to leave a review for Teaching in Higher Ed this could be your week.

Dave: [00:38:15] It could be. And we’d encourage you to do so and the guide is great. But the real value is the messages you send every week with all the links to all the gaps. An article you write so so much to get from that so join the community we’re excited to have you.

Bonni: [00:38:29] Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time. And. Thanks Dave.

Dave: [00:38:34] My pleasure.

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.