Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode number 197 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan discuss how interactivity and inclusivity can help close the achievement gap.

Production Credit: [00:00:17] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:27] 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 and 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.

Bonni: [00:00:53] I’m excited to be welcoming two guests to the show today. Before I introduce them, I did want to make a note that we are nearing episode 200 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast and there’s been an exciting development in process for about nine or ten months now.

Bonni: [00:01:11] And that is that we have gone back to all of the first 200 episodes and are catching up with the last few that we haven’t recorded yet and have transcripts that will be available for all of them on the Teaching in Higher Ed web site.

Bonni: [00:01:24] And I wanted to make a quick mention of gratitude I have for the financial contribution by the Teaching and Learning in Higher Education book series from West Virginia University Press, edited by James M. Lang. This series offers compact books from great writers who provide you with the practical guidance you need to help students learn and succeed.

Bonni: [00:01:47] And I’m just thrilled. I’m going to be welcoming many of the authors to the show and getting to interview them about the books- *whispers* I get to read the books. It’s fun. I get to read them before most of you get to read the books. *Stops whispering*

Bonni: [00:02:00] And I’m just really looking forward to this partnership and want to thank them for their financial contribution that’s making those transcripts for the first 200 episodes possible. And now let’s get back to introducing today’s guests.

Bonni: [00:02:11] I’m going to start with Kelly Hogan. Since 2004, she’s been teaching four hundred plus seat classes on campus using interactive teaching methods and technologies. By demonstrating the effectiveness of her methods in large lecture classes, her work has received national attention in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post among others.

Bonni: [00:02:35] Kelly works with other faculty to help them reimagine their teaching. She and her husband enjoy teaching together in summer study abroad programs because they expose their two children to new countries at the same time.

Bonni: Vigi Sathy is an award winning teaching professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience. Teaching the very classes she credits for charting her own professional career in Quantitative Psychology, Statistics and Research Methods. Sathy is also the program evaluator of the Chancellor’s Science Scholars, a program aimed at increasing representation of underrepresented students in STEM. Ph.Ds.

Bonni: [00:03:16] She’s engaged in numerous activities on campus using data driven techniques to promote students success. She speaks around the country about flipped classrooms and with Dr. Kelly Hogan about ‘inclusified’ classrooms. And a link to that website on the show note so you can learn more about it in an effort to broaden participation in the sciences.

Bonni: [00:03:37] She was born in India, but grew up in a small town in North Carolina and is a proud recipient of Public education K through Ph.D.- I don’t see that very often in North Carolina.

Bonni: [00:03:51] Both of today’s guests have a combined 20 plus years in the classroom at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And both were introduced to me through the partnership I have with ACUE’s course in effective teaching practices and I’ll link to that in the show notes if you’re not familiar with that course and also with a partnership that I have where they send me such wonderful guests.

Bonni: [00:04:14] Welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Kelly: [00:04:17] Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Viji: [00:04:18] Hello.

Bonni: [00:04:19] I have had so much fun looking at all of your materials and resources and watching interviews with you. I’m just thrilled to have you here. As I was preparing for today’s episode, one of the things I really realized I knew it before but it kind of really became very crystal- it crystallized in my mind is that I really used to think of issues of diversity and inclusively as separate and apart from issues of pedagogy.

Bonni: [00:04:47] And I realized that now since the last few years I’ve just been able to learn so much they have come closer together. But as I looked at your materials I just realized, “Wow I used to really think very wrong about this.”

Bonni: [00:05:00] And so much of the research around teaching and learning has changed not just my mind but many minds and many approaches all over the world. Could you talk a little bit about how you see the errors in thinking of having these issues of diversity separate from pedagogy? And then how it’s become more integrated for each of you?

Kelly: [00:05:20] So I think it’s a really common idea that people would think of those things as separate. They tend to crop up in our community and our society as something very separate. And in fact, I think most people think about diversity and immediately think racial ethnic diversity and forget about all the different ways that we are diverse

Kelly: [00:05:42] And Viji and I like to talk about students being like icebergs where you can see certain things about them. But there’s so much beneath the surface that you can’t immediately know about them. And we really like to take that approach when we think about our teaching, which goes well beyond race and ethnicity.

Bonni: [00:06:02] I love that analogy of icebergs because one of the things I try to do, I’m not perfect at it, but I also try to think of the beauty of that iceberg- that I may not necessarily have a first impression with a student that is like the the greatest first impression where I think, “Wow, I can’t wait to learn with you this semester.” It’s like even if it’s a less positive interaction there’s so much beauty beneath the surface just in all of our humanity together that keeping that as a mindset for me has been really helpful. But I like this analogy of iceberg of all those things that we can’t see, especially from those first impressions. Viji, what do you think about in terms of having these things having been separate, the teaching and the issues of diversity having been kept separate, what’s that been holding us back from?

Viji: I  think when we keep these things separate, we tend to think of these things as an add-on to our courses. And I think too, when we think about add ons it seems optional. And when we think of them as integrated, it’s really much more transparent to our students, to our peers, that this is not an add on experience that it’s actually part of our jobs.

Viji: [00:07:15] And we know as educators that we want our students to master the material, to do really well. And I think it’s really helpful to think about the ways in which we can facilitate that fully with all of our students.

Bonni: [00:07:27] One of the things that you’ve shared about was some research from Bob Henshaw (I believe the director of Center for Faculty Excellence, at least when you shared this information from a study on the fall of 2010) some real issues of inequity. I know you may not have the exact numbers right in front of you but could you just describe in general this inequity that was discovered in this fall 2010 class?

Kelly: [00:07:53] Sure, yeah. That was my class. I was teaching Bio 101 just an introductory biology course. And these are not data that faculty generally get to see about their teaching, which is looking at how students were performing across your class but broken down by demographics.

Kelly: [00:08:11] And it’s one thing to hear that nationally there’s a problem with retention in science. It’s another thing to hear that it’s happening at your university. But boy does it wake you up when you see data from your own course and you recognize that students of color are not performing nearly as well as your white and Asian students. And the gap between the performance was just jaw dropping to me, it made me sad. And knowing what I know about retention in the sciences, it made me feel like I wasn’t helping. Maybe I was contributing to the problem so I really took that to heart and really thought about how can I make a difference.

Bonni: [00:08:56] Speaking of things that make us sad. One thing that makes me really sad is what I would call an attribution error- which is oh there’s this disparity, if people do become informed or even just anecdotally they realize, “X population of students in my classes aren’t doing as well as this other population.” So often it is attributed to, “Well they just aren’t academically prepared. Oh that you know they came here we probably shouldn’t be even accepted then. They probably they should be in a more remedial program.”

Bonni: [00:09:27] What do you think it was about you Kelly that didn’t have that be your first thought as far as this has to be somebody else’s fault or maybe fault is too strong a word but you know I should really attribute these results to something else besides my own magnificent teaching.

Kelly: [00:09:42] Well it is a hard thing to think about owning those data and taking a growth mindset with it. I am a scientist by training and I think my first instinct was to say, “Well what can I do different. What part of this do I have to own. And is there something I can do in my own teaching to see if I can make a difference in that?”

Kelly: [00:10:03] So I started experimenting and educating myself about things that I could do differently and structure became a real important part of what I wanted to do, which is to increase the structure in those courses so that students were doing a lot more practice rather than listening to a lecture.

Bonni: [00:10:21] Brilliant. And Viji what has that been like for you in terms of what do you remember as early indicators that either something needed to change in your own teaching or something needed to change just with teaching more broadly?

Viji: [00:10:37] I came at it in a different way, I didn’t have that kind of data for my course but I had a real discomfort with what was happening in my classroom in terms of what students were not only thinking about themselves and the materials- I teach a statistics class and so I’m I’m often hearing from students “well I’m not a math person” and so this was almost an excuse for not really diving into it or maybe even holding them back from participating fully.

Viji: [00:11:02] And for me, I kept thinking but you’re a student who was admitted to this university, I’m asking you to do well in introductory statistics course, it’s something that I fully believe anyone in my course can do very well if they applied themselves in the right way. And I think for me it was more about how do I communicate that their work ethic was actually more important than innate ability and I didn’t think that innate ability had anything to do with this but it was also the exposure to tools that might help facilitate that.

Viji: [00:11:33] So I learned about a screen casting tool and that made when I learned about the tool that made it really clear to me that there was something that would allow me to bridge the gap between those students who felt like lecture was going too fast and students who thought lecture was going too slow in terms of the pace of the content. And so I thought well if I could put that online it’s shorter modules than students could watch it at the pace that made sense for them and then we could have opportunities in class to practice the work that they were saying that they were struggling with after class. So in essence doing the homework in class or the assignments or data analysis in class.

Viji: [00:12:06] And once I started to do more and more of that in fact I spent a semester just flipping the classroom and having them watch the videos and coming to class, I realized how valuable it was to have those interactions with students because that was what I was missing before. I loved teaching because I got to talk to students and in a sea of 200 prior to the redesign, I felt like I was talking to hear my voice practically and that was that wasn’t very comfortable for me.

Bonni: [00:12:34] Has your class size changed or has your pedagogy changed?

Viji: [00:12:39] My pedagogy has changed my class size has been the same all along. And I think what was the problem was that I was teaching when I first started teaching I was teaching the way I was teaching for 20 or 30 person class because I could walk around the room and we were doing a couple of problems and I didn’t need to have a lot of structure because I could do it impromptu.

Viji: [00:12:58] And then when you scale it up to 200, you do need to do things like put the instructions on the board in terms of what you want them to work on where you want them to go and how long you want them to work on a particular exercise. And I didn’t have that before and once I started to add those components I started to see that things were running a lot more smoothly. But more importantly, the students were understanding the kinds of things that they needed to do in order to solve problems successfully.

Bonni: [00:13:24] I’d love to have each of you describe a little bit maybe about before active learning, you know what do classrooms look like that are not adopting that- especially in your own discipline that will be I think interesting to see. And then what would it look like if we came into a very active inclusive classroom? And Viji, since you were just talking a little bit about that why don’t we start with yours because you sort of said class size was still the same but describe sort of the before and after it’s the extreme makeover version here. Talk a little bit about before and after, what would we see if we’re sitting in your classes?

Viji: [00:13:59] Sure. So I’d say before these techniques I think you would have seen if you’re picturing a classroom, picture a 200 person classroom fixed seating, stadium style, lots of steps and the instructors down at the bottom. I’m a fairly small person anyway. But you put me behind that podium and you barely can see me.

Viji: [00:14:18] And just having, it feels like you’re needing to have a command of this large space. And also there are students oftentimes behind their screens, sometimes there’s just all kinds of activities that might be happening in the classroom. And they’re set up, the rooms are set up so that you can really clearly see each student so it can be distracting to me as well when they are distracted.

Viji: [00:14:38] And so you might see me doing maybe a mini lecture on something and then asking them to solve a problem. In a statistics class, I feel like we were always pretty good about giving students chances to do problems in class. But what I struggled with was some of the problems would take a long time and you’d have some students who would get to the answer very quickly and some students who would really take much longer to get to. And what do you do with the time in between?

Viji: [00:15:06] So that was a challenge. That really it might have looked very much like a typical lecture oriented class with a few opportunities for problems. But I’d say maybe 75 percent of it was me talking at them and after redesigning the course, they would watch short videos of me doing those those types of problems online. The class time I would start with with a short quiz, so they would do a PollEverywhere quiz when they came to class to show me that they had come prepared to talk about this topic.

Viji: [00:15:37] And then they would use the rest of the time, I think of it- so my background is in assessment and I’m a quantitative psychologist by training- so one of the things that we work on is computer adaptive testing. And so I think of it a little bit like an adaptive testing scenario in a classroom in which I pose a problem. And based on the feedback that I get through PollEverywhere for example I adjust my instruction accordingly.

Viji: [00:16:00] So if I see that students are not understand concept, then I might need to go back to a slightly easier question or I might need to provide some instruction around that. So there’s a few different ways to respond but I think of it as an adaptive session essentially when we go through the class session and now that I’ve done it a few times I have learned to organize my questions in a way that they get to be increasingly difficult as the session goes on. And I also having some knowledge about test construction, know that it’s important for example to start with an easy one so that people get warmed up and feel good about it. And then you can start work towards those harder ones.

Viji: [00:16:33] But the classroom when we do these problems are very, students are talking to one another. They’re oftentimes because they’re in fixed seats and they want to talk to somebody behind them. They’re sort of turning their body to face the person behind them in the row or sometimes they’re not even in their seats they’re in the stairs sort of looking at each other’s laptops. It looks pretty chaotic actually when we break out to do the problems.

Viji: [00:16:56] And I sometimes have a hard time bringing them back to the attention to come back to me about how to how do we get back and then start to see what our answers are and work through the problems. But it’s a lot noisier and that’s that’s a good thing in my book.

Bonni: [00:17:09] I don’t teach classes as large as you do. So we’re talking maybe at the most 40, 45 students but it’s still work. Great work, but work to get them to feel comfortable enough to admit that they were wrong about something very publicly.

Bonni: [00:17:24] But I work really hard at that because I, like you, do these these quizzes and it’s such treasured information for us to know not only what they got wrong- you know there’s a disproportionate number of people got this particular question wrong but I want to know why. So I hope I try to help them say like, “Why was this right to you?” Like help me- and usually I’m able to build the kind of culture that they’ll just say flat out like, “Oh I thought this,” or I’ll even just phrase it even differently like, “Make this right. Tell me tell me why your answer- for those of you 20 percent down here. Tell me why your answer was right.”

Bonni: [00:18:02] Cause you can kind of carve out those those misunderstandings so much better. Are you able to do that with 200 people? Will they- Can you get them to say publicly like “Yes. Spotlight on me, I didn’t know the answer to this question”?

Viji: [00:18:14] It’s a great thing and we actually do that quite a bit. And again because I have some knowledge of test instruction I make some pretty good distractors in my questions. And so when I get to a question where the second choice, which is the incorrect choice is very popular. What I do is I throw it back to the room and I say, “Okay well this one was the second choice, it’s the incorrect one. But let’s get in the minds of somebody who may have answered this question. What what do you think might have led them down that path?” And so it’s not necessarily that you answered that question that way, but you could have. But it’s a chance for people to sort of put themselves in the shoes of somebody who made that choice and why that was a good distractor for that question.

Viji: [00:18:54] And then we might even go farther to say, “Well what would I change about the problem to make that a correct answer? How could we change the sound to make that a correct answer?”

Bonni: [00:19:03] And then how long are your classes typically?

Viji: [00:19:05] This class is 75 minutes, so we meet twice a week for 75 minutes.

Bonni: [00:19:09] And walk us through. So there’s the PollEverywhere quiz kind of activating learning and then it turns into almost computer adaptive testing where you know where you need to hone in a little bit more, where do we go next?

Viji: [00:19:22] So we do that over the series of the class session. There might be interspersed there might be some opportunities to do a demo. So some of the statistical concepts we’re talking about require either collecting data or doing some kind of a hands on demo. We did binomial distribution the other day so I had them flipping coins in class and we looked at the distributions of those coin tosses.

Viji: [00:19:43] I often use PollEverywhere to collect information on students and show that to them. So we did a short test anxiety survey, four questions, and then I turned that data back around to them so that they can see that this is actually pretty prevalent in the classrooms. And also we can talk about ways to combat it when the test comes around.

Viji: [00:20:01] And it’s a good way for me to not only show them how data is really useful to collect but it’s also I think a way to build community too when you know that you are not alone. If you have extreme anxiety about how you might perform on the test, I think one of the testing anxiety questions is “I often think about what might happen if I failed the exam” or something like that.

Viji: [00:20:26] And then when they see that the number of students who strongly agree with that statement, it’s pretty sobering for all of us.

Bonni: [00:20:33] That’s really powerful. I know in my own teaching, this is an area I need to grow in because I’ve thought I’ve loved using these tools so much but I tend to use them almost entirely for retrieval practice, you know cognitive- But I’ve not done it for some of the- I mean we know that that test anxiety makes a huge difference in one’s ability to perform well on a test but it just hasn’t occurred to me. So I’m really excited about what possibilities there are with asking other kinds of questions using this technology. That’s that’s really cool.

Viji: [00:21:04] Yeah the other one that I really love is I do a true, false but it’s “true and I’m very certain of my answer” or “true and I’m not so certain of my answer” and false and the same. And then you start to see a little bit their metacognition related to how true or false you can get it right just by guessing but just a sense of how comfortable they are with the concept.

Bonni: [00:21:25] Thank you so much. And Kelly, let’s talk a little bit about your extreme or maybe not even not so extreme makeover in terms of what your classes looked like and what they looked like today.

Kelly: [00:21:35] Sure. When I first started teaching, I thought a classroom had to look a certain way and that excellent teachers were noisy and entertaining and funny. I’m married to one of those people, who’s an awesome professor/ teacher and he’s a comedian and an entertainer and I thought well that’s what a good teacher does and that’s not me at all.

Kelly: [00:22:04] So my redesign really suits me and fits me so much better because I’ve become a facilitator rather than an entertainer. And I love thinking about, “What’s this going to do to their brains as I asked them this question?” And I can’t wait to see what the data look like as they’re coming in and that’s what thrills me when I think about teaching.

Kelly: [00:22:25] So, you would have seen me uncomfortable trying my best to stick to my script that I would have in front of me when I was a lecturer and it just, it was fine enough but it wasn’t me.

Kelly: [00:22:38] And now you would see me in the rooms always asking a question first and sometimes letting them wrestle with it and I’ll say things like, “I want you to think on your own first.” So there’s a technique we all know it’s called think, pair, share. And a lot of faculty forget about the think part and just have students jump right into talking to each other.

Kelly: [00:23:02] But one of the things I really love in a large classroom is enforcing silence and when people come observe me sometimes they’ll say you used silence in a way I’ve never thought of using it. And it gives people, especially introverts, like myself, that time we need to think about what I want to say to the person next to me.

Kelly: [00:23:25] I like to write things down as I think and it’s that quiet time to do those things. Then I’ll often have students talk to each other and do that justification about here are some choices. It’s not enough just to say “Choose the correct choice.” I always remind them you have to justify your answer and be able to explain it and teach it to somebody.

Kelly: [00:23:46] And then we’ll have some sort of share out. There tends to be a rhythm with the class. Sometimes I use technology, sometimes there’s a lot of drawing I like to do in biology. Some are visual models and some are quantitative models. But I always like to say that the attention span of a class goes down the larger the class size.

Kelly: [00:24:07] So I teach over 400 students and I would not leave them on their own with a case study for even five minutes. That’s too long. They drift very quickly. So I like to ask them a question give them a chance to wrestle with it. Share out. Clarify as the expert in the room and kind of repeat that again with a variety of different modes and visuals but the rhythm that I get into keeps me going and if I’ve been talking for too long I see it in them. “Oh. They need to talk to each other again.” And we need to just keep switching modes and you get this feeling with your own students how that needs to go and interestingly, if you bring in a guest lecturer they get a little thrown off because they’re like, “Well that wasn’t the way we usually do it.” You know if somebody comes in and starts talking too much, they they really do enjoy this, it keeps them on their toes and time goes fast and they’re entertained and they’ll sometimes even say to me, “You’ve really bent my brain today.”

Kelly: [00:25:08] So to me, it’s fun. I talked about the silence. But as Viji also said there’s a lot of noisiness that goes on in the classroom. And I think another thing to note is that in a lecture style classroom, if you were to record the noise you would hear a single voice and that would be the professor. But in an active learning classroom you get a great mix. And there’s even some rubrics around measuring noise.

Kelly: [00:25:34] So Kimberly Tanner is somebody that’s done some work about recording the noise of a classroom and being able to get a sense of the kind of teaching styles that are going on in that classroom. I think that’s really fascinating because in my own classroom and probably anybody else that does act of learning. Once you send them on their own how do you get them back? Do you tap the microphone really hard? Ring a bell? Like do you wave and jump? I’m a little person and so like how do I bring them back to what I want to do with them as a group? And that’s just a great feeling when you know they’re having a really great discussion and you’re going to interrupt it but that’s that’s the rhythm of the class again.

Bonni: [00:26:15] So how do you do it? If I came in, I was watching and was right in the middle of talking with my colleagues sitting next to me about I was going to say binomial distribution, but I’m in the wrong discipline. This’ll really show my lack of knowledge on your particular discipline. I’m talking about something related to cells, yes. There we go. And then how do you get me back? How do you get us all back? That’s a lot of people, 400 students. And because you’re not doing it just three times, if I’m understanding correctly you’re constantly “Okay talk, okay come back. Okay think silently, okay talk and then come back,” you’re six, seven, eight, ten times?

Kelly: [00:26:55] Yeah, at least. It’s seventy-five minutes so it’s it’s a lot of cycling through that. Sometimes the class will sort of lull. And it gives me an indication that they’re kind of done discussing. Sometimes I do, I tap into the microphone and say, “Okay, okay, all right we’re gonna…” and I have to say that a few times. Other times I might switch the slide and the visual sort of brings them back to me. So those are different ways that I might get their attention. It’s a good problem to have.

Bonni: [00:27:27] Well that’s so great that you pointed out it is a great problem to have. One thing that I would just caution people listening is to recognize from very early on in the class you are conditioning the entire group of people for how this is going to work. So if you let it go too long, especially early on, because you’re hesitant to then just confidently move onto the next thing, switch the slide whatever it takes. Then you’ve now just conditioned them and then as the class starts to go throughout the term or the semester that time just keeps going longer and longer because everybody is so much more comfortable with each other. You’re setting norms is what you’re doing.

Kelly: [00:27:59] Right.

Bonni: [00:28:00] And you want to set a norm that we can quickly gather back up and there’s going to be something exciting and another puzzle to solve and then just that they get more accustomed to that. And it builds that culture in the class.

Kelly: [00:28:10] And I think that’s another important point that when we talk about structure in the classroom it’s not just structure around course design and the practice that they’re going to do it’s also structure around being an excellent facilitator and that’s another area we weren’t all trained in. And Vigi and I like to talk to faculty in our own professional development about sometimes the facilitator has to be the person that sets those rules. That’s the structure you bring. If you say we’re going to have a five minute conversation on that topic then you are the facilitator and you turn the topic after five minutes.

Kelly: [00:28:45] And that doesn’t make you a bad person because you said up front we were just going to have five minutes and that has to happen in our teaching as well and I think a lot of people just don’t feel comfortable sometimes being the person to stop something that’s happening.

Bonni: [00:29:00] You mentioned too that the student who said “you bent my brain today”- we don’t like having our brains bent on every single day. I mean the outcome when we get to the end of that process feels beautiful, magnificent look at all that we accomplished together. But in the moment it could be a bad day it could be “I’m not quite comfortable doing this yet” it could be that “I didn’t come into this classroom feeling like I had the abilities to do this”. So it’s not going to feel great every single moment of every single class to have one’s brain bent. But boy to have one’s brain expand, which of course not literally, but to have that you know know what the long term goal is- That’s wonderful.

Bonni: [00:29:45] Well one of the things I know that each of you feels strongly about is let’s not just talk about this from a theoretical standpoint but let’s have some really practical concrete things that we can do to change our classrooms. I’d sort of like to divide our topic in this in some really small ways we might do this. So if you are finding yourself as “I know that my class isn’t as active as I would like. What are some small ways I might just start to change this in my own teaching?” And then anything that’s maybe, it’s still concrete, but maybe a little bit bigger that would take a little bit more planning or some inspiration that we might draw from- what you’re doing in your classes or other people that you know that are doing some larger scale things around active learning.

Viji: [00:30:28] Well for me, I think one of the little things you could do is to think about collecting evidence of learning in the classroom more regularly. And I use PollEverywhere because I have a large classroom, it condenses the information very quickly and also a data oriented classroom so it’s helpful to show that in my in my courses.

Viji: [00:30:48] But there is no reason I couldn’t collect that information through an index card from my students on the way out the door or their couldn’t be- my brother is an educator in middle school and he has students use hand signals at their desk so they might put their whole hand out front of them to show that they’re still thinking and then they would make a fist if they feel like they don’t know the answer and they would make a peace sign if they say they think that they’ve got the answer and are willing to share it.

Viji: [00:31:16] So there are ways that you can periodically assess through a class session if your students are understanding the material or if they need help with it. And I think thinking about ways that you could check and if you just start to infuse that into your course and try to do more and more of that as as possible then it makes it very helpful for you to get some information about what you might need to change in your instruction.

Kelly: [00:31:40] I think one small thing you can do is to change your mindset so that the rhythm of your class changes a bit and you stick with the phrase “Ask, don’t tell.” Even if you’re going to do a lot of lecturing, I think it’s really useful to draw the student in with a question first and coming back to what Viji just said you get a sense of where the students are at already. You can ask and make it a discussion and you can ask through technology you can ask through notecards. There are lots of ways you could actually ask but the students then will be ready to to learn and be there with you.

Kelly: [00:32:21] Because they’ve had to think through the question they’re a little bit more on the edge of their seats wanting to know what it is you’re going to do and you’ve already bumped up engagement by starting with that question first.

Kelly: [00:32:34] Once you realize that they’re with you and they’re engaged. You’re likely to realize, “Well I want to do some really cool things. I want to ask them some really good questions. What would it take for them to be more prepared before they came to class to do a really cool question here?” And that I think will then lead you to “I’d really like them to do some homework and I’d like to build some structure around the class where they can come in and I can start doing more and more of this.”

Kelly: [00:33:00] But I think it’s OK to start small with that mindset and get into that rhythm a bit more and see that engagement, the way they light up when you kind of pose the question first and then explain.

Kelly: [00:33:12] I also just wanted to go back to something that you said about starting with a question and getting them engaged. In terms of something about themselves.

Bonni: [00:33:21] Yeah.

Kelly: [00:33:21] And that brings them back to inclusiveness back again because we know that in particular certain student populations need to make this material relevant to them to themselves to really feel engaged with it. So for example, just yesterday in class I was talking about vaccines and I wanted to know who had gotten a flu vaccine this year. Because we were going to move towards talking about how they work. And so I asked them how many have gotten them.

Kelly: [00:33:47] And for those of them who did it why didn’t you get it? And you know I was setting them up because after years of teaching I know what they’re going to say and a lot of them have this misconception that they’re going to get the flu from the flu shot.

Kelly: [00:34:00] So then I read some of the reasons out loud and then before long you know I’ve just shot down that misconception and that stings when you’ve said something wrong, right. I always say to them making a mistake is a big part of learning. But that just became incredibly relevant. And I’ve had students e-mail me a semester or two later my dad finally got a flu shot. I convinced him after everything I learned from your class that you couldn’t get the flu from the flu shot. And so to me that’s the greatest sense of the student learning something, she could argue it and convince her father to change his behavior.

Bonni: What’s the paradigm or is there a paradigm you use kind of to think through, “Is this inclusive?” Are there frameworks or ways in which you think – because I mean there’s so many times when I recognize in my past teaching I just wouldn’t have known, I wouldn’t have realized it. And even in terms of where if I’m using tests that are written by the publisher, by whoever wrote the textbook or sometimes there where I go, “There’s some work to be done with the inclusivity of the stuff that’s provided to us from the publisher.” So what are some frameworks or how do you do that for yourself? How do you go through that layer?

Kelly: [00:35:20] I think it’s easier sometimes to know when something isn’t inclusive then to always know immediately how to make it more inclusive. So I think working with a partner really is the best way to go. And one of the dreams we have is to think about making our own rubric for what does inclusive teaching look like? And it ranges from things like are the photos that you’re showing in class and the readings are they from a diverse group of people or are you showing a diverse group of people in this field? Are individuals matching with the audio that you know you’re providing?

Kelly: [00:35:55] So for example a lot of times people will put up something and then talk over it in a different way. We are very forceful with faculty that we coach to say if you’re going to put up a wordy slide, read it exactly to them or just be quiet. There is no other choice.

Kelly: [00:36:12] And then the techniques with the students, are they going to have an opportunity to talk in small pairs which is going to help those students that don’t feel comfortable talking to a large group but they can still be part of this discussion. They’ll be talking to their peers. What you want to add there? What other ways do we think through this?

Viji: [00:36:30] It’s the kind of thing that the more you do it the more you start to see opportunities for improvement as you go along. And it sounds selfish to say, but I think about how I would behave in that setting because I’m a pretty shy person and it happens a lot more in meetings I think now.

Viji: [00:36:46] And so I can think about that setting a bit more. But you know if I was asked to do these things, what would make me comparable to participate? What kinds of things would I need the facilitator to do and what kind of prompts what I need? How could I be encouraged to share my thoughts with a group of people?

Viji: [00:37:06] And that’s a really, for me, that’s an easy way to think about as a facilitator what I could do in a room full of people where a large number of them are having exactly those kind of thoughts.

Bonni: [00:37:18] You said this earlier but I just want to circle back around to it before the recommendations, because you were talking about photos as an example. And I’ve seen so many times where people they do get inspired and they want to make a difference so then they go and replace two photos. I believe it was Maha Bali, who was on the show previously, talking about like this is not whipped cream nuts and the cherry on top of a sundae, like this has to really be rethought from the ground up or it’s going to be your lack of authenticity in this, your lack of real purpose, real focus is just going to be like it almost makes it worse because it’s so obvious you’re making a half handed attempt at doing this right.

Bonni: [00:38:01] And we’re all gonna make mistakes. I mean we are going to make mistakes when we attempt this because that’s kind of natural but just recognizing it does have to be something that starts very foundationally.

Kelly: [00:38:12] The good news is when you’re a teacher you get lots of opportunities with your students, it doesn’t have to be all done in one class. And so the first day of class you lay the foundation and you’re explicit about your care for each student and that you believe they all belong there. And this is the contract you’re going to make with them about how you’re going to teach inclusively.

Kelly: [00:38:31] Then you get to put it into practice. And if you have a few lessons where you’re not showing a diverse group of photos that’s okay because you get the whole course to be able to show that you really believe in these things and that you’re doing these things in practice over and over.

Bonni: [00:38:49] This is the point in the show where we each get to share our recommendations and for mine. I was so, so absolutely thrilled to get to hear Bryan Stevenson speak here in Southern California a couple of weeks ago. Some of you might remember, he is the author of Just Mercy which is a book that was used at many institutions at least here in the United States as their freshmen collective reading book. And it’s just wonderful. And he shared a lot of the work that he’s doing at the Equal Justice Initiative. And they’re committed – and I’m reading from their website – “to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.”

Bonni: [00:39:36] And everyone who went, we were gifted with their 2018 calendar, it’s a racial injustice calendar, and that was just a marvelous gift and you just open it up and really get educated about a history that is not often told.

Bonni: [00:39:56] And then the second thing I wanted to mention is they’re doing, speaking of history, they’re doing a wonderful project which is to build a memorial. And it’s to build a memorial of lynching in America. And he just describes how you know we have monuments that are built and constructed in our country around lots of parts of our history but that’s a part of our history we haven’t really properly named and identified and shared those stories that need to be told.

Bonni: [00:40:25] And I can’t even do it justice, I almost hesitated putting this in as my recommendation because I feel so ill equipped – to even share the story but I’m going to put the websites to the memorial that they’re building which just seems like such an important way to tell our country’s story and to name things that was really what he identified we’ve got to – if we’re going to heal as a nation we have to be able to name things and this is a part of our history that just has not been documented in the way that we have documented other aspects of our history and just how important that is.

Bonni: [00:40:59] So I’d encourage you to go check out the links which will be teachinginhighered.com/197 and check his information out there from the Equal Justice Initiative. And I’m going to pass it over now to Viji for your recommendation.

Viji: [00:41:15] Sure. My recommendation is a couple of years ago I took out my phone and made an audio recording of my name and I uploaded it Google Drive and made it a public link I made a short link and I put it in my email signature because I was having trouble getting people that I worked with to get to pronounce my name correctly. And I wanted to have some opportunity for people to hear how to how to pronounce it, because I think it’s awkward for people when it’s an unusual name you don’t want to get it wrong but you don’t necessarily know who to ask about how to pronounce it correctly.

Viji: [00:41:49] And so I wanted to give people a chance to be able to hear it maybe privately in their office, to practice saying it but then I started to realize how useful it was and because I made it a short, I could track the number of times people accessed the pronunciation and which sources, it’s also on my web site so I could see on average about 20 to 30 times a month somebody is checking out how to pronounce my name. Which is it’s cool for me from a data perspective to see that.

Viji: [00:42:14] But then I started sharing it with my students as well because it’s really important to me as especially somebody who has an unusual name that we take the time and care to pronounce people’s names as the way they would like for them to be pronounced. And so I asked my students to do the same and then I have a dropbox folder where they can just upload an audio file of their name pronunciation so that I can practice it.

Bonni: [00:42:35] Oh what a brilliant idea. I don’t know if I got the idea from you or someone else but I did the website is getting some redesign because of the transcripts that are coming out. And so I did record our last name it’s really hard to print so I recorded that but I didn’t even occur to me to put on my email signature. I was more thinking about it for the podcasting world but not even for the core central thing I do for a living. Thank you for sharing that recommendation and especially to have your students do it too. That’s fabulous. Thank you so much. All right, Kelly. Drumroll time, your turn.

Kelly: [00:43:08] All right, I’ll set it up first. Two moments in my history. In fourth grade, I had to stand on one corner of the classroom and yell to another student in the classroom as loud as I could. And the reason I had to do that was because my teacher made it explicitly clear that being quiet was not okay and she was going to fix me of that and it was humiliating. And I felt such a sense of shame about being quiet.

Kelly: [00:43:38] Fast forward to my college years and I go to visit a friend in Colorado so it was a vacation for me. His parents were hosting me and we had dinner with them. And afterwards he told me, “you know my parents are hosting you and you just you really need to talk to them a little bit more. Like that’s not really nice of you not to talk to them more.”

Kelly: [00:44:02] And so once again I felt that shame of being who I was, which was on the quiet side. So drum roll, my recommendation is the book Quiet by Susan Cain and when I read it I probably had tears streaming down my face because I felt this sense of vindication.

Kelly: [00:44:19] She helped me understand that the environment was set up to benefit extroverts but that we introverts had so much to offer and she provides a lot of evidence of that. And then at one point she says hand this book to somebody that’s an extrovert who loves you. And I continue to pass that on to my students on the first day of class and many of them will refer to it later on and say that book was just as powerful for me too. And so it helps frame the kind of teacher I am for them but also frames all the techniques I do around what would make me comfortable in this classroom and Viji I came together and when we got to know each other that was a bit of a shared history for us both feeling introverted and using that as the lens of how we approach our teaching too.

Bonni: [00:45:08] Thank you both so much for your recommendations and also for being on the show today, it was such an honor to get to talk to you. And I’m just really grateful for your stories and your advice some practical tips. I’m just excited to see how this might magnify out into the teaching community. Thank you so much. I’m full of gratitude.

Viji: [00:45:26] Thank you.

Kelly: [00:45:27] Thanks for having us.

Bonni: [00:45:31] Thanks once again to Vigi Sathy and Kelly Hogan for being today’s guests on Teaching in Higher Ed. If anyone wants to go visit the show notes and learn more about them you can go to teachinginhighered.com/197.

Bonni: [00:45:47] And if you’d like to subscribe to the weekly update you’ll get the show notes from each episode as well as a blog post about either teaching or productivity right into your inbox, you can subscribe at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

Bonni: [00:45:59] Thanks so much for listening and I’ll see ya next time. It’s Episode 197 so we’re very close to those transcripts coming out from the first 200 episodes of Teaching in Higher Ed, it’s very exciting. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.

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.