Bonni Stachowiak: Today, on episode number 389, I’m feeling grateful and I’m going to talk a little bit specifically about how I’m feeling grateful for podcasts.

Production credit: Produced by innovate learning, maximizing human potential.

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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.

On today’s episode, I’m going to do a little bit of a retrospective. I’m going to share about my 2021 podcast favorites. What am I listening to? What do I suggest you listen to? I’m also going to share about a post I wrote on the 21 Top Downloaded Teaching in Higher Ed Podcasts since 2019. I’ll explain why I’m cutting it off at 2019, even though we’ve been around since June of 2014.

I am going to share about a couple of standout episodes that aren’t necessarily always on the highest downloads or some of them are, but they’re not all on the highest downloads, but just that I really recommend are worth either revisiting or visiting for the first time. Then I’m going to share some recommendations at the end of the episode. Let’s begin with the 2021 podcast favorites.

On most years, not every year during a pandemic, but on most years, I enjoy following Brian Alexander’s example and that is spending some time documenting what are some of my favorite podcasts that I have the great privilege of being able to listen to. I have a blog post on Teaching in Higher Ed where I outline all of them. That blog post was posted in October of 2021. As soon as you post something like this, then it’s already out of date and I’m not kidding.

I’ll share with you later a little bit about how it already got out of date, but I share some of the teaching and higher education podcast that I absolutely treasure. There’s one that I want to call out that is many of you might be familiar with, EdSurge has a podcast, but they also started a series that a number of episodes have been released on the EdSurge feed, but all under the theme of bootstrap.

It’s called Bootstraps and it’s looking at some educational myths, including that we ought to just– if everybody could just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, everything would be okay. I’m not even doing it justice. It’s such a great series, and so I suggest that. I also suggest a specific episode that came out very recently, that if you were only going to pick one, which– how can you pick one favorite because they’re all so good, but I will post in the link.

One that just came out from the podcast host and producer, Jeff Young, and he just did such a nice job of sharing a slice of his life that I think is really worth a listen. I hope you’ll consider checking out some of the other podcasts about higher education and teaching. There’s some really good ones in there, and then at the end of today’s episode, I’ll be sharing about my– in my recommendation segment, one that I only just discovered after writing the post and definitely would’ve included it and it will certainly be in next year’s post.

Also, just I’m so enjoying listening to it as well. On that same post, I talk about how I get some of my news and politics and some of the shows that I enjoy listening to. I talk about technology podcasts I like to listen to and what I call mind expanding shows, including the brilliant Scene on Radio, which is a two-time Peabody-nominated podcast from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

This is not one of those shows where you have to go back to the first episode of the first season to be able to understand what’s going on. The earlier seasons beyond the one that is the current one, were just breath-taking, including season two was on Seeing White and season three was on Men. Oh my goodness, brilliant, life changing, transformative audio storytelling. Oh, so good.

Lots of other mind expanding in shows. I could literally do episode upon episode off of just any one of the shows, let alone trying to combine them. I share about podcasts I listen to help me stay abreast of things happening in my discipline, so things around business, economics, and leadership.

I talk about what work and productivity shows I enjoy listening to. Also, I struggled to find a category for this but I ended up calling it life and faith, just episodes that I find very nourishing that I really find an important part of my podcasting listening. I talk a little bit about podcasts I started paying for. Most podcasts are free, as you probably know, but there have been now some subscription models that have come out, whether that’s through Spotify.

Now, that’s a paid service and so you can get some of their exclusive podcasts, but I haven’t started paying for Spotify because I’m an Apple Music person. I will admit to having been tempted though, but I do subscribe to a couple of techy podcasts that if you’re into interested in, you can read about on that post. Then I made an attempt, oh, I struggled with this, but I made an attempt to try to say, “If you could only have 10 podcasts, that’s all you could choose, what would you choose?”

It was ridiculously hard and I didn’t like it the second that I posted it because I felt like it was missing some on the list that were just absolutely key, but all right. What are you going to do? I did my best. You can check it out and then know that I changed my mind as soon as I hit publish on the post, so there you go. Next step, we have a celebration.

Things I am thankful for having to do with people who come on Teaching in Higher Ed and have the kinds of conversations that are absolutely transformative in my teaching, and so many of you have told me that it [inaudible 00:06:29] been transformative in your teaching as well.

In 2019, Dave and I changed podcast hosting companies. We have the records, the spreadsheets, if you will, from the prior to 2019 from 2014 to 2019, but they’re in a separate data source than since 2019 when we switched over. I don’t often go back and try to recombine manually those two different data sets and I didn’t for this year. I have the top 21 of the most listened to episodes just since we made that switch in 2019.

There’s a post that you can access, it’s in the show notes, and also will show up in your email if you’re subscribed to the Teaching in Higher Ed weekly update. Coming in on the downloaded show, is not that surprising when you think about both that we had a pandemic and a lot of us shifted over to teaching on some sort of a synchronous web conferencing platform, and also just because it’s such a brilliant educator, I had an opportunity to talk to in 2020.

That is in episode 324 with Dan Levy from Harvard talking about teaching effectively with Zoom. He has a wonderful book by the same title, lots of great resources in that episode. My colleague, David Rhoads, joined me on episode 309 to talk about HyFlex learning. He had a subsequent episode he joined me on around some of the myths, the misunderstandings around HyFlex learning that a lot of you shared you enjoyed as well.

Elizabeth Barkley was the third most downloaded episode. She recorded with me in 2019. That was episode 263, Recipes for Effective Teaching. Episode 320 was the fourth most downloaded episode. That was a conversation with Jesse Stommel. We talk about How to Be Together in Learning Online. A lot of that episode has to do with the words we use for things. The episode starts out with him talking about words he could really do with never hearing again.

That was something he expressed in a tweet that we then extended into that conversation. Paying the Price by Sara Goldrick-Rab. She came on episode 258, which is the fifth most downloaded episode of Teaching in Higher Ed since 2019, to talk about her research through the hope center and the real college surveys and some of the issues having to do with our learners who are unable to meet their most basic needs, which of course impacts their education.

It’s a really powerful episode and her work is so important. The sixth most downloaded episode was episode number 316 with Maria Andersen. This episode has continued to swim and swim and swim in my head in the most positive of ways. She talks about how to design for an uncertain semester or an uncertain season and one of the things that really stood out to me about that episode was just the simplicity of having the same cadence every week in a class.

She talks about how she creates the same type of an assignment where they learn, they explore, and then they apply. Having that repeated pattern helps to create an opportunity where she makes sure students are given authentic ways to apply what they’re learning, and they’re given ways to explore, and play, and go find the things that they’re passionate about. Then, of course, making sure that there is a fundamental foundation for whatever it is that they’re trying to learn. The seventh most downloaded episode of Teaching in Higher Ed was with Jared Horvath in 2019, Stop Talking, Start Influencing.

That was a book by the same name and really enjoyed that conversation just about us being effective communicators in our roles. The eighth most downloaded episode since 2019 was episode 254 with Michelle Miller. Oh, I love this conversation talking about learning myths and realities. The ninth most downloaded episode was with Courtney Plotts, Culturally-Responsive Online Teaching. That was episode 314.

I’m not going to go through all 21. I’m going to stop at 10, which is this next one up, but I’m going to encourage you to come over and decide which one of these you might wish to revisit. The 10th most downloaded episode since 2019 was with Travis Thurston and it was Online Engagement Through Digital Powerups. What Travis has done is really to deconstruct traditional “discussions.”

I put discussions in air quotes because we tend to call these things discussions that are not actually discussions. He has a way of helping create more metacognition on students’ parts of what kind of their learning are they applying through a series of hashtags and helping have different kinds of conversations that are searchable, that can be revisited, that can be a little bit more like an actual conversation. I encourage you to revisit that episode as well.

Those are the two things I wanted to share with you in terms of the 2021 favorite podcasts I’m listening to, what you’ve told me through your downloads, the 21 Top Teaching in Higher Ed Episode since 2019, and all of this really started with I got to celebrate international podcasting day with Barbi Honeycutt back in October. She joined me for an episode, How to Use Podcasts in Teaching.

If you happen to miss that one and you would like to use podcasts in your teaching, that’s a great reference for you. Through the rest of this portion of the episode, I’d like to share just a couple of episodes I want to make sure that you don’t miss. That just because they didn’t pop up necessarily in the most downloaded since 2019, that are still just absolutely ones that I think are really timely for where so many of us find ourselves today.

I’d like to share a few episodes, encourage you to listen, and then I’ll end, of course, as always with the recommendation segment. Betsy Barre joined me for a conversation about How to Use a Course Workload Estimator. What I’ve heard from so many of you, which I already knew in terms of this was that it was so much more than just the course workload estimator, which is like a little calculator that helps us determine how much should we assign, how do we estimate out of class workload for our students.

Of course, so much of this became vital as we all moved online. Then it changed where things weren’t necessarily always measured very well and then really needed to be. In this episode, she talks about all kinds of stuff from speed reading, and that type of a myth and how much actually time do people need to read. How do you estimate them? What are possible mechanisms by which we might estimate how long it takes people to read stuff? It’s just a delightful conversation.

She’s so good at uncovering things that aren’t necessarily looked at with the kinds of lenses that she brings to them. I just cannot recommend that episode enough, How to Use a Course Workload Estimator with Betsy Barre. Which, of course, is linked to in today’s show notes at teachinginhighered.com/389 also probably in your podcast player. Another episode that was really important to me was– is really just feels like an ongoing conversation since almost the very beginning of Teaching in Higher Ed back in June of 2014.

That’s a conversation I got to have with James Lang about his second edition of his book, Small Teaching. Anytime I get an opportunity to speak with him, he challenges me, he gives me hope, he gives me a sense of direction of the kinds of ways in which I want to continue to change my teaching so I highly recommend that. It’s so easy for us to get overwhelmed, wanting to do better, wanting to be better, and just trying to balance so much, and he shrunk it down for us.

It’s not about trying to change everything about every class because we’ll never arrive there. We will never reach that destination, but what are the small fulcrums in our teaching that could actually drive the greatest results? Another conversation I really appreciated was a follow up conversation with Dan Levy from Harvard. On Improving Our Teaching is what I decided to call it although we explored so many topics there.

He’s such a brilliant educator and I find myself leaving conversations with him wanting to find more ways to help students be curious about things, to help them be able to see what the big picture is of why any of this matters. He’s just delightful so I hope you’ll consider going back to listen to that episode. I had a chance to speak with Alex Venet on Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education.

She has a book by the same name, and I know that I needed to learn about trauma-informed education and need to continue to do so. It’s a wonderful read and if you haven’t read it yet and want a little slice of what she’s all about and to learn a little bit about trauma-informed education, I do recommend that episode. We know that the pandemic didn’t invent issues in mental health, but certainly has exasperated them.

I got to have a conversation with Sarah Lipson and Laura Horne on The Role of Faculty in Student Mental Health. I encourage a listen to that episode for us to be able to recognize the ways in which we might be able to influence and help our students in these crucial areas. The last episode I’d like to talk about in this segment of the show is a conversation I got to have with Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan.

They’ve both been on the show many times and we all enjoy now that it’s just like resuming a conversation that we’ve been continuing now for a couple of two, three years now. This conversation was about two data tools that they have used at their institution– they’ve been a part of launching and then implementing, around Equity-Enhancing Data Tools.

One of the data tools has to do with students having a better sense of what course it is they’re taking and how that course is structured so that they can see in advance, “Is this the kind of course with a final and a midterm and a paper? As in lots of high stakes assignments? Or is this a course that has no tests and maybe this is a course where learning is explored and developed and applied in other ways?”

That’s one of the equity-enhancing data tools as one that allows for greater transparency around how courses are structured and the other equity-enhancing data tool has to do with allowing us to be able to see in our classes where we may inadvertently be disproportionately negatively impacting marginalized populations.

Kelly talks about her own journey with that and discovering some of the similar data in her own teaching and the changes that she was able to make as a result of having that kind of a data tool on an ongoing sustained basis. It’s a wonderful conversation I highly encourage a listen to. This is the point in the show where I get to share my recommendations and I have two of them for you today.

The first recommendation is if you were only going to listen to one episode and you’ve been dealing with some of the same challenges so many of us have been, I do recommend just the one episode with Jesse Stommel, How to Be Together in Learning Online. That was episode 320. It’s in the recommendation links for today’s episode. As I think back to all the difficulties, the challenges, I think back so often to that conversation with Jesse.

He was so transparent. He was so real, he was so raw, and I just loved being able to be vulnerable together with him in that conversation. I thank him for his vulnerability and his courage with what we shared together that day. I guess I’m also celebrating that I was willing to be vulnerable about some things in that episode too and it just feels like a comfortable place to revisit and think back to a tender, gentle conversation about where we find ourselves and how to be together in learning and in teaching.

The second recommendation I have for you is the podcast that I mentioned did not show up on my 2021 podcast favorites because I didn’t know about it when I wrote that post because if I had, it surely would’ve made that list. That is a podcast from Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning. It’s hosted by Catherine Ross and the podcast is called Dead Ideas in Teaching. I’m going to read from their description on their website about the description of what the show is all about.

They write, “Our mission is to encourage instructors, students, and leaders in higher education to reflect on what they believe about teaching and learning. In each episode, guests are invited to share their discoveries of “Dead ideas.” Ideas that are not true, but that are often widely believed and embedded in the pedagogical choices we make.” I have, as of today, listened to, I believe, two or three episodes.

I got another one going right now I’m halfway through on. Every conversation has been so enriching and I am so excited about having that continue to be in my queue of listening and helping me continue to work to be an effective educator.

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Bonni: Thanks so much to all of you for listening to today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed and for being a part of this community. As I think about feeling grateful, feeling grateful for podcasts, I am even more grateful for beyond podcasts, just a community of people who care about teaching and who care about learning. Thanks for listening. I will see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed, and I hope you will consider subscribing to the Teaching in Higher Ed update if you don’t already.

That’s at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next time.

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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.

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