Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 506 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, how to use high structure course design to heighten learning with Justin Shaffer.

Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:22]:

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. Justin Schafer is the associate dean of undergraduate studies and a teaching professor in chemical and biological engineering and in quantitative biosciences and engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Justin teaches anatomy and physiology, introductory biology, chemical engineering, and biomedical engineering courses, and does education research on the efficacy of high structure course design with specific attention to strategies that promote student success in intro STEM courses. Justin also has a passion for faculty and future faculty development in the areas of course and curriculum design and assessment, evidence based teaching strategies, and discipline based education research, in which he works with individuals and departments through his independent side venture, Recumbent Education. Justin Schafer, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Justin Shaffer [00:01:48]:

Thanks for having me, Bonni. Looking forward to this. It should be super fun.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:51]:

Speaking of super fun, I’m gonna tell one of those back in the day stories. Everyone loves a good back in the day. So back in the early nineties, I when I first started learning that there was such a thing called instructional design, I was working for a computer training company, so they would a lot of the emphasis was on computer based education. And, Justin, this won’t surprise you, but back in the day, an idea of an interactive course was just to press the next button. Somehow, I’m engaged because I’ve clicked a mouse on a next button. And, you know, but as I started to read some of the research and and get to know a couple people in that field, I was very new to it, but I I continued to even to this day be intrigued by don’t just tell people how to do something if you’re teaching a skill, for example. But also, like, show them what it looks like when it’s not working. So Microsoft Excel don’t just teach me how to build a formula, but also show me what happens when you build it wrong, The kinds of error messages that might come up and that kind of thing.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:51]:

So I’m really intrigued by your work in high structure classes and but wanna begin with that premise of just tell me what does an unstructured class look like before we start to discover classes look like? So what what do you hearken back to in back in the day when it comes to unstructured classes?

Justin Shaffer [00:03:11]:

Yeah. I can relate to the show them how teaching by how it doesn’t work first. Just as a quick recent example, my kids are about 15 years behind in video game technology. So over Christmas, we got them a Wii with Dave Dance Revolution. Having them watch me try to dance on there, it’s an exercise in how not to do something properly. My son quickly exceeded my skills there. But when it comes to structure in the classroom though, yeah, the the structure is so darn important for getting making sure students are able to scaffold their learning before class, in class, and after class. Not all students need it.

Justin Shaffer [00:03:45]:

Some students might be doing just fine with the traditional, maybe unstructured class. But we know from evidence, lots of research now shows that this type of structure does help students, not only all students do better, but helps some students do even better than otherwise. So but in an unstructured course, sure, how could what could this look like, right? So the first word that comes to my mind with an unstructured course is confusion. Right? So you you what you go to the website, let’s say it’s a modern class, you got Canvas or another LMS, you go to that website, it just is like the default look of Canvas. You have all the links on the left. Half of them, you don’t use. You don’t know what’s where to go. It’s kinda like when you make a figure on Excel and it’s the default color scheme and axis and it looks like you know? Right? So that’s kinda what I get that feeling of the when I see a Canvas page like that, which I don’t see many like that to be fair.

Justin Shaffer [00:04:33]:

But, you know, if as a student side, you go in, you don’t really know where to go. Okay. Well, I need my lesson slides for today. Maybe you go to the files link, but there’s all these folders. You don’t know which one to go to. But maybe you find the right one, and then just a list of PDFs with numbers like lesson 1, lesson 2, and no real idea of when to use them. Do you print them out ahead of time or they post it after. Right? So a lot of confusion from just the Dave entryway of that.

Justin Shaffer [00:04:54]:

There might not even be a welcome to the class with how to get started. In class, then you show up and, again, you might not be totally prepared on what the topic is. There’s probably not learning objectives or learning outcomes for the day, so you don’t really know. You know, it doesn’t have to be like my daughter’s 3rd grade class where they write the schedule on the board or anything, but, you know, even like an early slide doesn’t tell you necessarily what the plan is for the day. The lesson might be picking up up halfway from the past lesson, which, you know, I’m guilty of that too. I run out of time. But it might just be kind of a little jilted and you’re not sure where to go and what’s coming. And just another thing with that confusion can be lack of communication, you know? You’re not totally sure as a student when assignments are due, You’re not sure what is on the assignment even, you know.

Justin Shaffer [00:05:36]:

So sometimes when a faculty might say to their students, oh, we’ll read chapter 6. Do I have to read all of chapter 6? Do I read just the sections in bold? Do I skip the figures? Right? So there’s just an overabundance of information, and it’s hard to navigate in an unstructured course. So I think that’s a problem with that. And from my own experience with teaching in this model, I’ve been trained in high structure kind of from the get go. I was in one of these post doctoral programs called IRACDA. It’s the big global name of it through the NIH. My program specifically was called SPIRE with North Carolina. And so I was trained in evidence based teaching strategies and courses design methodologies.

Justin Shaffer [00:06:15]:

I also had the lovely benefit of being there with Kelly Hogan and she took me under her wing helped guide me through the process. But when I first taught my class, first time ever was at North Carolina A and T State University in Greensboro. It was kind of a high structure class, but it was my 1st time. Right? So I had pre class stuff, and I’ll get more into this a little bit later probably about what this means, but I had some pre class work. I had active learning in class, some homework after class, so I’m following that model, but brand new instructor, confidence is kind of low and, you know, how did you get this all Dave? So at the very end of the class, I had a survey and I asked students a bunch of stuff, but one of the questions was, what’s the most important thing you learned about this class? And a lot of the students said things like, well, the most important thing I learned was about cellular respiration or how nutrition works. This was an introductory biology class. But 1 student, I’ll never forget this, they said in, they said in the survey, the most important thing I learned in this class was to never ever take another class with you again. I’ll never forget that.

Justin Shaffer [00:07:11]:

So even though I I like to think I was using structure properly, again, new novice and structure, I had a lot to learn.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:18]:

I know we’re gonna be looking more at sort of the before, during, and after, but you said something that really sparked my curiosity. And that was I mean, just just my my interactions with you prior to today’s conversation. It’s almost like you’ve been using high structure with me and and vice versa. You you are a fun person. You you are energizing. You’re you have a wonderful sense of humor. And and I like to I like to I like to picture myself that students come into my classes and go, like, wait a minute. I’m not used to seeing movie clips from Zootopia in my business classes, which I I just finished, giving some feedback to students on.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:57]:

So that I was like, what did you notice? What did you wonder about that? And so I was like, oh, that Zootopia clip, it was really interesting to think about. And also I was like, yes. I did it. You know what I mean? That but but at the same time, I know that I can, Justin, be a little bit too much of a free spirit. So I find the tension between, I Bonni surprise, I want to delight, I want to get them curious, I want to make them think, I want to bring out some of the emotions. I’ve been inspired by Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s work around the importance of emotions in learning. But at the same time, I can confuse people, Justin, because my mind does not work at all in a linear way. So what I’ve what I’ve for myself Dave just tried to get better about at the very least number things.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:08:42]:

So I’ve I’ve just started experimenting with, you know, 10 lessons and 10 challenges, and really trying to simplify what might show up in the calendar in Canvas. That’s something I’m really experimenting with now. But I find myself thinking a lot about making the title of it intriguing intriguing versus having the title of whatever it is be descriptive. So I don’t know. Do you run into that of, like, how can we have things simultaneously without the title being so long that, you know, in any learning management system or any PowerPoint slide would be rendered meaningless? How do we navigate these 2 tensions? The unpredictable with the structure. Yeah. I don’t know. Any thoughts on that?

Justin Shaffer [00:09:25]:

Yeah. That’s a yeah. Great great questions and thoughts there, you know, and I appreciate your students like Zootopia. It’s a good one for sure. I run I I like to use, like, mid nineties movie references totally over their heads. I I’ve been too old. It doesn’t work anymore. So but with the structure, though, yeah, it’s a cool point because it’s really not has nothing to do with the content, honestly, you know, the structure.

Justin Shaffer [00:09:46]:

It it’s more about just how the course itself is set up. So, right, so high structure course design really came out of biology education research. Scott Freeman, Mary Pat Wenderoth were the 2 champions of this in the late 2008, 2009, 2010 range. And, that’s where I started out learning from them. And it’s about though the course itself and the mechanics or the shell of it, not just about what you’re teaching. So again, while I came out of biology and it’s definitely as a toehold in STEM, you know, I also teach in chemical engineering, I use it in my chemical engineering courses. I’m teaching introduction to biomedical engineering right now, I do the same thing there. So it’s out of STEM, but I truly believe it would work in our history or work in economics or other social sciences.

Justin Shaffer [00:10:26]:

I just haven’t firsthand seen it. So if any listeners are out there that do it, let me know. I’d love to learn more about it. But when it comes to the content, so you can have the structure of the guidance of getting students ready before class by getting some basic content acquisition through reading, watching Khan Academy videos, making your own videos, having to maybe interview somebody, a lot of ways to get content ahead of time. And then some kind of pre class assessment, that’s really the key. You know, I’ve learned the hard way over the years, if you don’t have even a nominal amount of worth to an assignment, students are more likely not to do it, even if it’s for their benefit. So having some kind of pre class formative assessment, I usually do I call them reading questions, so a bunch of quizzes on Canvas or other LMSs, low points, usually unlimited attempts, a lot of possibilities to earn those points. And then you get to class, and so that content again is is, yeah, the beginning stuff.

Justin Shaffer [00:11:19]:

The before class, that might be the more descriptive, the more boring, if you will, like the more rote things. So as an example, when I teach introductory biology, before class, I can have students read or watch a video about the organelles of the cell, parts of the cell, right? Then when I get to class, I don’t have to talk about that, right? I don’t have to go over the basics. I’ll still lecture. I’m not an anti lecture guy. I’ll still do it. I just have a new word for it. I don’t call selectoring because we’re selectively lecturing about things that are important. We’re not lecturing over the basic things that you can get from the reading ahead of time, perhaps, or a video ahead of time, but that leaves more time then for that creative yeah.

Justin Shaffer [00:12:00]:

It leaves more time for the creativity, for the burst of energy, for the enthusiasm, for the other Pixar movie clips. I know. I think Zootopia was DreamWorks, though. But you know what I mean. So for those different types of things and I’m a big case study guy, so so I love having narratives in the classroom. And those are definitely across disciplines, not only STEM. And the reason I like them is because it brings real people in, real things in real stories. They could be fictional too, but you’re getting other people involved and students are learning about a real world context or a real world problem.

Justin Shaffer [00:12:29]:

And across STEM, I find them very useful. I even came up with a new thing that I call pod cases. So, right, we’re all listening to podcasts right now. I hope you’re podcast fans. I like case studies, put them together, what do you get? You get a podcast. So on my website for my for my business, Recombinant Education, I have a list of resources for pod cases available for you to download and check them out that Dave podcast episodes intertwined with actual content knowledge to tell a story to the class. So that’s really where your creativity can shine, I think, with the high structure model. So the structure is kind of the wrapping around, if you will, then what happens on the gooey inside in class, that’s where you as the instructor and your personality shines.

Justin Shaffer [00:13:08]:

I appreciate you telling me I’m fun and outgoing maybe. I don’t always feel that way, but thank you. But in class, right, that’s my kind of performance space. It’s the closest I’m Bonni get to stand up comedy is being in the classroom. I can’t stay up that late at night to do a riddle set. So, you know, that’s where I can shine there. But even if you’re not like that, if you’re a little more introverted, which believe me, I am too, ask me to return something to Kohl’s. No way.

Justin Shaffer [00:13:30]:

It’s never going to happen. So I’m very socially awkward and anxious. But, if you’re like that in the classroom too, you can still use high structure, have your own personality come out, however that might be, and use creativity to help students explore the the content knowledge you’re trying and the skills that you’re trying to help them develop.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:45]:

And then since you brought up the before, the during, how about the after? What are some of the strategies we might be thinking about employing to keep that engagement going? What are you thinking about for the after part?

Justin Shaffer [00:13:57]:

Yeah. So for the after part, and the the keyword through all 3 steps is alignment, which we from education research and also evidence based teaching in SoTL, we think of as connecting the pieces through a class, tying it all back to learning objectives, using backwards design, perhaps. So with the after then, you’re building on what happens before class and in class. So before class, you can bring in that basic kind of lower level blooms, remembering, understanding knowledge base. In class, we’re doing a bunch of active learning to practice that, whether it’s individual, group work, I’m a big clicker guy, you know, anything you need to do. And then after class, you’re Bonni build on that further. So you’re going to have maybe a weekly homework set, and you’re going to do a weekly online quiz. Although those are more traditional in STEM as types of assessments, this semester, in my introduction to biomedical engineering class, I’m trying to go more of the, as the term goes, authentic assessment route.

Justin Shaffer [00:14:49]:

So I still have a high structure course. They do pre class reading guides and reading questions. We do a lot of active learning in class, but on the back end, I don’t have weekly homeworks and weekly in class quizzes like I might do in my introductory thermodynamics course. Instead, I’m having them write a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship proposal over the course of the semester with lots and lots and lots of checkpoints. So students are applying what they’re learning in class, developing their own proposal. We also have some smaller design homework assignments. So I’m trying to merge now the traditional high structure model which is based Bonni, you know, think of these large intro STEM courses. I used to be at UC Irvine.

Justin Shaffer [00:15:26]:

I would teach intro bio there, 440 students at a time. I like to think of it as 8 80 eyeballs at a time. So you have your quizzes, your exams, your traditional assessments. But now, I’m trying to add in the authentic flavor of assessment on top of the traditional high structure. And it’s, you know, it’s only been 2 weeks, but it’s been going great so far with class. I have about 65 students, and we’re having a blast together.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:15:48]:

Boy, I love how emblematic you are of that that you’ve been doing this for a while. You got to learn from some of the best in this in this field and really be inspired and influenced by them, and yet here you are experimenting. And spoiler alert on my recommendations, I’m gonna be sharing about some things that I’ve been experimenting with you, and I love hearing from someone who I just get the sense that we’re never Dave. That it’s not like you have it all figured out, not like I have it all figured out. It’s that that willingness to gather data by failing and having some things not go well, and then go, okay, well, that didn’t go well. And speaking of failure, something else I’ve been intrigued about and it’s attention that I see in my own teaching, where when I would find some failure points. So you think about, you know, I have gotten better at high structure and Dave learned along the way from so many people that have come on this podcast. So I might go like, that didn’t go well.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:39]:

Sometimes I’ll try to fix it too much because sometimes it’s actually through the struggle that the most powerful learning happened. So I’m a big believer. I I loved getting the chance to interview from UCLA, Robert Bjork, a memory researcher. And he he has this quote, which I’ll never forget, which is kind of ironic if you think about it. And he says, forgetting is the friend of learning. So So I’m always trying to remind myself, like, you like, yes, some of the struggle, I should reduce. I should reduce if there’s something that’s confusing about the structure of my course, which is why I always ask at the end, what did you think about how things were structured? Got some good feedback and and I already incorporate. I mean, I just continue to to draw on that kind of thing.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:17:22]:

So if the structure isn’t if the struggle isn’t related to the what I’m attempting to facilitate, then you gotta get rid of that. Right? But sometimes that struggle is actually the most key. How do you navigate that as you think through your classes to where you actually could streamline it or scaffold it too much such that you render too smooth of a a path toward that learning?

Justin Shaffer [00:17:48]:

Sure. Yeah. So that’s that’s a good point. Yeah. I don’t think the structure necessarily guarantees success because it’s the students ultimately have to put the work in to earn that grade, to earn that outcome. Right? I like to show Calvin and Hobbes a lot in class. In my 1st day of class, every semester, every class, I show 1 where Calvin’s talking to his teacher, miss Wormwood, and she basically says something about, you know, well, you you get out what you put in. Right? So so it really comes in that, but it helps to, in a way, level things out and norm everything for the students because, especially, if you’re a a 1st chance student like I was, my 1st day of college at Penn State, you know, giant school, maybe this happens a lot, but I ended up at the football stadium, not at my introductory chemistry class because I was so big, and I didn’t know what classes to take.

Justin Shaffer [00:18:36]:

You know, there’s all these issues you come into. I didn’t know how to study. I didn’t know how to prepare. So you Dave those challenges that you might come in with because you don’t have that prior experience. So the structure helps get you ready, but you don’t necessarily have to do it all either. And the primary example of this is a reading guide. So this is again inspiration from Kelly is that I’ve I’ve written these now for all my classes. I have them on my website as well for many textbooks, and I published on these too in CBE life science education on their efficacy because I also do deeper work on the side here.

Justin Shaffer [00:19:08]:

But the reading guide is a way to help students with transparency with their reading. So I always tell students this every semester too. I always tell them, I want to know what you know, not what you think I want you to know. Okay? So to me, transparency is huge. And so the reading guide is the 1st step of that because you got this giant book, right, with all this content or giant website, whatever you’re having them read, the reading guide helps narrow it down. It doesn’t have to be a book. It can be a video. It can be a journal article.

Justin Shaffer [00:19:36]:

Whatever it is, it helps narrow it down by telling them, look at this specific figure, read this passage, answer this question, here’s some terms that are underlined. But these are optional. And I found them to be more useful optional because they can be a couple pages long, you know, once a day or once a week. I’m a I’m a weekly model now guy. But you you don’t have to require them and students have them there as a resource. So if you require them, those students feel like, oh, it’s just another thing to do. Check the box, you know, and they move on. So by by making this as a resource, I show them the data from my paper that shows the more often students do these, the better they do.

Justin Shaffer [00:20:07]:

So it’s a way to help provide the structure, help students along who might need it, but doesn’t force everyone to do it necessarily either. But also with the idea of structure kinda being too structured as you were saying, Again, it’s kinda independent of the content. So right now with my biomedical engineering class, my homework assignments, which are Bonni the after class phase of high structure, they’re completely open ended. Right? Our 1st homework is gonna be designing a recombinant protein. It’s up to you. You pick the vector, you pick the protein, You pick the expression system and the purification system. Right? Next one’s gonna be designing a biomaterial for an implant. Totally open ended.

Justin Shaffer [00:20:44]:

So they’re still And I’ve actually, early on, had some conversations with students even for the the research proposal I mentioned earlier. They’re a little nervous because they’re not used to that open endedness aspect. So even though it’s a high structure course, that open endedness piece is totally prevalent. And in engineering, right, that I do with design is a big piece, so that’s a natural thing to happen there. But also in engineering, we like organization. I love spreadsheets. My wife tells me I should Dave been an accountant, I’d make more money, Right? Because I like spreadsheets so much. So I like organization.

Justin Shaffer [00:21:15]:

I like structure, and that’s what my students like too. They like the predictability of things. Think about maybe your own kids or definitely my own kids in the summer or over a break, like winter break. It gets a little long. They don’t have a normal structure their day. Things sometimes, go a little south. So having that structure as humans, I think, is good too, and but it still allows for creativity, allows for inspiration, allows for the struggle with learning and documenting the learning through various forms of assessment.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:42]:

You mentioned using a lot of Calvin and Hobbes, and we also have talked about how hysterical you are. I can’t I also I also feel like, be Bonni. Be funny right now. I I how much of that is planned? I mean, when you’re when you’re thinking through how to structure a course, are you thinking through I don’t I don’t know if you’re familiar with the article and the research around a time time foretelling, but is the idea that, researchers Bransford and Schwartz, And by the way, speaking of forgetting things, forgetting being the friend of learning, this is maybe my 2nd time actually saying their names without stumbling over. Like, let me go look up what their names are again. But I first heard about this from Derek Brough, and that’s why I remember Derek Brough’s name and not the researchers. But the idea that and the example that gets given often is the Diet Coke and Mentos. That if you wanna get me really curious about why when you put Mentos inside of Diet Coke, and you shake it, that explosion happens, but doesn’t necessarily happen with regular Coke.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:44]:

But rather than start with the lecture on the chemical processes that are or are not happening to have these 2 different results, well, let’s just try it out, and let’s get diet coke spraying all over your backyard, which true story, I was actually doing a keynote for the Lilly conference and had mentioned I was only speaking anecdotally and had never experienced this. And a very, very kind faculty member went out and bought me Diet Coke and Mentos and brought it to me before I left so I could go home and experiment with the kids in the backyard. But anyway, so a time for telling is, you get me all curious why is this explosion happening with the diet coke, but it’s not with the regular, like and then I’m ready for the more dense, then you have my curiosity can, help me pay that attention that’s needed. And I’m more their research shows more more patient, more able to tolerate. Tolerate’s probably a terrible word to use here, but to have the persistence, I think, is the more precise word to be able to navigate that. So what comes to mind for you as you think through those planned curiosity boosters or or bringing in some of the the emotions or or getting people to predict and wonder and be curious about stuff.

Justin Shaffer [00:23:52]:

Oh, yeah. And so, yeah, absolutely Dave sense. I just didn’t know the title, like you said. Yeah. I mean and, again, that’s kind of why I like case studies so much. You know? And now, right, you can get them to the National Science Teacher Association, those of you in STEM, if you’re in business, you have your other homes for your case studies. But you know, at least for the STEM based ones, again, you got a story. So you hook students with some kind of narrative, some kind of situation, maybe a video or things, and then you get them curious about it and then you kind of, Okay, we’re just gonna take a break now.

Justin Shaffer [00:24:18]:

We’re gonna get into of the core learning objectives for the day, look at some data, do whatever, and then we’ll come back to the story at the end. So the one I learned my lesson, though, with this kinda related to the Diet Coke Minto. So there’s a great case study that I borrowed and I apologies to the authors of it. I forget your names. It was published at the time when the National Center For Case Study Teaching of Sciences was at the University of Buffalo hosted there. It’s a case study on cellular respiration in the body and energy, and the basically, the question was, do energy drinks actually give you energy? Right? So because energy in biology means something, but energy on a can of Red Bull means something else. Right? It means, like, stimulation. So to demonstrate this, this was my 1st class where student learned never to take another class with me again.

Justin Shaffer [00:24:57]:

I chugged the whole can of Red Bull at 9:30 in the morning in front of a 100 students at North Carolina A&T. I was sweating about patience of the heart. I was getting faint within 10 minutes. I’m like, oh, this isn’t going well, everyone. I don’t know if this is energy or not, but I feel something. You know? But then by the time that was when we introduced it, you know, and then we get to the end, and we talk about the mechanisms, what does it mean for ant molecules to Dave energy in the cell, and in the end, we look at the nutrition facts for Red Bull or in this case, we show them the can and, it was a diet one, right? There’s actually no calories in it. So there’s nothing that gives true biological energy. It’s just all stimulation with caffeine and other things.

Justin Shaffer [00:25:36]:

So, yeah, don’t do that again, at least not for me.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:25:39]:

Not not advice.

Justin Shaffer [00:25:40]:

Coffee intake, you know, and things like that nowadays, but, yeah, doing some kind of demo, some kind of video, some kind story. You know, even I I like to talk about my own life a lot again and my own kids’ experiences when I was in their shoes, tell stories. And because, again, that builds that interest up. It kinda but you don’t tell it all right away. That’s what I’ve learned too, right? You can kinda set them up, you know, a little cliffhanger. If it was like a Netflix series, you got to stop at a cliffhanger and then you come to the next one. But by the end of the lesson, I promise you, we’ll find out what happens. And, whenever I say, okay, well, do you want to know what happens? And they say, yeah.

Justin Shaffer [00:26:12]:

I say, Okay, we will find out in 30 minutes. Sometimes, I’ll get some audible, Oh. I’m like, Oh, good, they’re involved, they’re investing. So that’s a fun way to tell it. And again, you

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:20]:

can do this. This is all

Justin Shaffer [00:26:21]:

the in class part, right? You can do this however you want with whatever strategy you want. You do this online with videos. You can do it asynch, sync. It applies across the board with high structure. But that in class piece is really where, again, you as an instructor, your own personality, your own niche, your own stories can shine and let let that come out and then let your students see that side of you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:41]:

Boy, that example is so powerful in terms of you’re you’re combining so many techniques that the research would seem to indicate really heightened that learning as we in almost every case, unless we have the attention, the learning isn’t gonna happen. So the ability to have someone persist in their curiosity about something, whether you’re asking them to predict what do you think happens if we do x, or what do you think happened in the past, and being able to bring in multimedia. I’ve done that with podcast episodes before where play the first part of it. And then what do you think happened to the currency fluctuations in this country after these researchers did this? Okay. Talk about it. And then but the idea to then say, okay. We’ll wait. And then if you get those audible groans, then you know you’ve actually been able to help.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:27]:

You were reminding me of something else. I wanna ask you quick a little bit more about this before we get to the recommendation segment. But you were talking about being a clicker guy. And of course, clickers are you don’t have to go far into any book about how to make use of clickers to to have these kind of prediction activities, and then what do you think happens. And I think it’s fun to consider what happens when you show everyone else what the words are versus or what the answers are, like as people are answering them, because we’re so influenced by what other people think versus when you hide them. And then sometimes you might hide them at first and then release them and then start to see all the answers go over. I mean, it’s it’s fun how those kinds of techniques can you can become so playful, but what I hope people are hearing from your stories is that, yes, you’re using your natural some of your natural gifts that you have, but you’re you’re doing it over time. Like, you know, oh, that time oh, if I coulda timed that a little, I’m gonna go 5 minutes later next time, or I didn’t really explain that part of the instructions and you’re building upon it, but it is very intentional.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:31]:

It looks effortless. It looks, oh my gosh. Like, the oh, I didn’t even think about that. Oh, he just said this, but but it’s over time being willing to experiment and then go, oh, okay. And then also being able to use some of these approaches in other ways. So you talk about your pod cases. Okay. So you built your first one, and then you see what kinda works with that.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:50]:

Okay. Well, now I’m gonna do another episode of the pod Dave, and then just constantly building it. So let’s talk a little bit about clickers before we get to recommendations. When you say clickers, I’m curious. I’m guessing you probably don’t mean physical clickers, although maybe you do today. Are you using physical clickers? Are you using some kind of app on people’s phones? Or how are you approaching that?

Justin Shaffer [00:29:08]:

Yeah. We’re we’re a mix on our campus. So we are an iClicker campus, so we still have a lot of our first year students using the physical remotes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:29:16]:

Mhmm.

Justin Shaffer [00:29:16]:

But our students have been navigating to because after their 1st year, they usually get rid of it. So then they buy the app when they have me or someone else in their sophomore, junior, senior year. And, yeah, so it’s a mix.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:29:28]:

Okay. Well, I’m gonna have to email you separately because I think I literally have 75 iClickers from back in the day. I don’t know how long ago they are, but I feel so environmentally irresponsible. I just don’t know what to do with these. So we’ll we’ll chat we’ll chat separately and be like, can I mail these? Are these still useful to anyone out there? It would be a fun conversation to have. So

Justin Shaffer [00:29:47]:

You can recycle them through Apple or something. Right? They’re out of their old old broken phones. You drop them in a mailbag a mailbox, and they’re gone. But, yeah, but the app versions now are so cool because they have all these different question types. You know? And that’s what I’m really trying to push here with my own students and my colleagues, and then I also do workshops for faculty and future faculty on best practices of teaching and course design. And one of the workshops I give is on best practices with clicker usage and trying to make use of all the bells and whistles, right? Because whether you’re a campus that has a platform that’s free, it’s probably part of the tech fee or rolling the tuition somehow or students paying out of pocket, you gotta make sure you justify the use of all these, EdTech tools out there and how they’re worth it. So all like this Wednesday of class this week, we used clickers really for the 1st time in this semester, and I used all 5 different question types, my first 5 questions of the semester, to show the students the different variability you can do including, like, touch the screen now, target questions, things like that. And I asked students, have any of you used any of these other than multiple choice before? And, like, 4 students’ hands went up.

Justin Shaffer [00:30:48]:

And I said, oh, great. Well, what class did you use them in? They said, oh, your class last semester. So, you know, unfortunately, they’re still not widespread, but it’s now, again, with the app based clickers, it makes it so much more engaging. Also, right, students tend not to forget their phones very often, so you don’t have to worry about that with accountability issues. Like, with the physical clicker, you you forget it. Batteries fall out or break, you know. But that’s another kind of the segue going back to high structure is the, forgivability of this kind of system. Right? Because when you’re thinking of structure and before class, you know, frequent assignments before class, in class stuff, after class assignments, you gotta 4 out of 16 pre class assignments.

Justin Shaffer [00:31:34]:

You get to drop 10% of your clicker scores. You know, whatever it might be, you allow for that flexibility, and then students still can go back and make things up if they want. But, again, it’s dropped, so they don’t have to email you. They don’t have to let you know, Oh, I can’t be here today, or they don’t come up after class with their answers written on a note card, here’s my clicker answers for the Dave. Say, oh, don’t worry about it. You get to drop it. No big deal, you know? So it makes it easier for them, cuts down email traffic for you and worrying about things like that. So just being flexible is something I’ve learned over the years too.

Justin Shaffer [00:32:02]:

You talked about kinda growing into it, you know? And it it’s I appreciate the effortless claim there, Bonni. I do feel in my space. Like, I feel like I found my calling, if you will, being in front of people in an academic setting, whether it’s students or whether it’s in front of other faculty in a workshop setting, I love them both. I feel very comfortable. It definitely takes time. It definitely takes time to do that, you know, but the experience is what lets someone get to this point. So I’ve been doing this about 12 years now. I just kinda know what might happen, and if it does happen, I don’t freak out anymore, whereas I used to freak out.

Justin Shaffer [00:32:35]:

So you just kinda roll with it a little bit more. That’s one of my colleague’s mottos with new classes, and let’s roll with it. So I kinda just I can do that. I don’t I don’t get as stressed as I believe me, they’re stressed, but it’s just a little stresses are in different places now. The the classroom experience, because of the structure, honestly, helps me manage it more. Students like that structure. They’ll like, when I teach multiple sections of a class and they’ve had me before, my section fills up first. I like to think it’s because of my charming personality and stupid jokes, but what they actually tell me, it’s because of the structure.

Justin Shaffer [00:33:07]:

Like, they they love how it’s set up. I even had students go on to future classes that I don’t teach in junior year and say, oh, hey, where are the reading guides? Where are the reading questions assignments? And they’ll the instructor will tell me, like, what’s going on with this? And I’ll say, oh, well, yeah, that’s what I do. But I tell the students, if your future classes don’t have this, you’ve now developed metacognitive skills, you’ve developed surly skills or, being able to develop your own learning and modulate your own learning on your own, self regulated learning, and you can handle classes that have lower structure. You Dave set you up for future success in managing your study skills and ways you approach courses whether you know it or not.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:43]:

When you spoke about that flexibility and the ability to drop some assignments, in in case anyone listening doesn’t get some of the nuance out of that, I was thinking as you were sharing back to what the writing across the curriculum programs often say, which is writing to learn, learning to write, writing to learn, learning to write. And you were reminding me of that a little bit. Our our son is in middle school and is is taking a math class, and they got their report cards back. And I’m sure it’s a best practice for podcasters to tell stories about their kids’ grades without their them being here. But no. No. No. You got a very, very good grade.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:18]:

Nothing nothing to be concerned at all about. I was intrigued because just just because I’m curious how the course design went, that he had lower scores on his quizzes and exceptionally good scores on his tests. So I wasn’t at all harping on what’s up what’s up with these quizzes. But I was kinda curious, you know, how he made use. He says, yeah. Well, you know, we’re and it sounded like this this math teacher has that same same kind of flexibility. So he had he had already figured out that. And I I love this because sadly, most of us are throughout too high a percentage of our learning.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:51]:

It is gonna be how do you game the system, you know? Okay. Well, I knew those didn’t count so I could do that. Like, and and I and the way that he described it was, like, the game was kinda not really central for him. He said, oh, those quizzes help me learn, but I really would need to spend the time then on the the exam. So it was I I guess sort of it was described a little bit as but he’s figured out where his time is best spent, and his time in taking the quizzes, he could relax a little bit. He didn’t need it to earn the grade he was aiming for, cause they were just helping him learn and then really figure out how to focus his attention for the exams, which were weighted more and had the higher stakes. It was just really cool to think, you know, when we structure these things with the low stakes that they really can facilitate that learning without the pressure, which really doesn’t help heighten heighten the learning that at least that’s what the scholarship of teaching and learning body of evidence would seem to indicate.

Justin Shaffer [00:35:45]:

Absolutely. Yeah. That that stress that’s associated with these high stakes assessments and it but having those quizzes or homeworks to scaffold and get you ready for that is is really key. But I I’ve actually moved away from the midterm model, even finals now. I’m kind of off and on for doing final exams rather more. One of my one colleague, Adrian Williams at UC Irvine, told me once, like, with the high structure model, instead of having these big peaks of stress, we’re just trying to normalize that stress and smooth it out through the entire 15 weeks. So it’s a little bit of stress constantly, but not these big spikes. But, yeah, it helps out for sure there, but then it also have, like, more of the alternative grading approaches.

Justin Shaffer [00:36:20]:

My colleague here at mine’s Becky Swanson. She’s working on the mastery based grading for a linear algebra class and got some really cool findings there to show that if students really know these big outcomes and they get multiple attempts through different avenues to demonstrate their mastery, that’s fine. And she’s doing it through a combination of homework and quizzes in class, you know. But but giving students that whatever grading model you choose, right, and there’s a million amount there these days, as long as you make it okay for students to fail and you give them that chance to fail because that’s how you talk about early, failing, forgetting, and things like that. Right? It’s okay. That’s how we learn. It’s how we grow. My daughter’s kindergarten teacher and I’ll talk about my kids too.

Justin Shaffer [00:36:56]:

Right? My daughter’s kindergarten teacher said, you know, whenever you make a mistake or fail, your brain gets bigger. And it’s true. Right? To this day, I’m trying to learn new things. I’m trying to to try to have new things in my own personal life, you know. This over the summer, I started learning how to shoot a recurve bow. It’s totally sucked at it at 1st. Still pretty bad at it, but a little bit better. So things like that, you’re gonna fail.

Justin Shaffer [00:37:17]:

You’re gonna assess. You’re gonna revisit it and get better. Same thing with learning in the classroom. So just a lot of different things you can do as long as you create that environment that it’s okay to do that and it’s okay because we’re in this together. We’re trying to learn together to be to become better students and pursue whatever aspirations you have after college.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:37:35]:

This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. And speaking of failure, I hope I’m not failing. I attempt to not recommend the same thing twice. I love it when guests do that because it means it’s a book I really should read or a podcast I really should listen to, but I try not to. In almost 10 years, I failed at this once that I’m aware of. I don’t I hope I’m not about to fail again, but I wanna recommend Alan Levine’s cool tech. And his cool tech, I’m gonna link over to the page where you can learn it, but you could follow it on Mastodon, for example. I follow it through what’s called an RSS feed.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:11]:

So every time Alan Levine posts about new technology, it comes right into my RSS reader, which I use in a reader, and I’m off and running getting to experiment. And I’m at about half the time that which is probably not a great number for, like, I just wanna play with everything that he recommends, but he’s so good at helping me discover cool technology. And so speaking of cool technology recommended through Alan Levine’s cool tech, I discovered something called I he helped me discover something called Leah script. So I need to start by explaining what markdown is very briefly, which is hard to do, but markdown is just a way of writing where it’s plain text. Everything is super super plain text, so it’s kind of future proof because as much as images change over years and file formats change over years, text kinda doesn’t change. Text is text, there are letters, there are symbols, etcetera. And so markdown is a is a is a way of writing that I’ve gotten used to for podcast show notes and for blog posts, and then I can copy it and paste it into lots of different formats like rich text or HTML, all that stuff. So I’m familiar with markdown.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:21]:

Leo script is something that sits on top of markdown and makes your basically, creates for you what I could best describe as if an open textbook and open presentations and open slide decks all went and, got together and started a family together. So it sits on top of there and and basically takes a markdown file and turns all your headings into navigatable menus off to the left, like you’d expect to see in a in a textbook. Oh, I can skip straight to the section I’m interested in. It has a full text search throughout your entire open textbook, open presentations, which is something that today’s learning management systems typically don’t have. And I haven’t experimented with this yet, but it can be embedded in this by the way, Leah script was started by some scholars in Germany, and they’re embedding it in as a SCORM compliant course, meaning it’ll talk to a learning management system. So if you’re using something like they I believe they mentioned Canvas as one of the ones. I believe they mentioned Moodle as another one that they’ve experimented with, but then then you could actually score some of the quizzes that people take along the way as they’re reading the book. So leoscript is something I am still early in experimentations on.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:38]:

I’ve learned a ton. Dave been challenged a ton. And one of the things my last recommendation is that just because something can be done, doesn’t mean you should try learning it. So I mentioned that, Leah script, you can actually produce the same text from the same markdown file as an open textbook, as a presentation, as your actual slides that you might use in class. They have this weird thing not weird. Thing that I’m curious about where you could share a QR code to your class and they could actually join you at that exact moment in time. So there are all these things that you could do. And at some point, I just had to cut myself off.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:14]:

No. You’re not gonna build your slides this way. That’s like, no. You’re not gonna do that. No. You’re not gonna build, like like, you’re just going to build an open textbook, which I’ve done before. In the past, I’ve used Pressbooks. And so this time, I thought you you can build this and and curate and collect some openly licensed content to place in there.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:31]:

And the Zootopia clips that Justin and I talked about earlier, they’re all in there waiting to be had. But just this idea of the patience that it takes to go, you know, you’re experimenting with a lot right now. Settle yourself down and just you gotta you gotta call it at some point. Like, this is this is what I’m doing for this defined period of time. So I’m having fun continuing to be fed technology through Alan Levine and so many others that are doing open learning out loud on on the web, which is so inspiring. And then Leah’s script, but I’m experimenting with specifically Haven’t experimented with all of it, but I’m having to settle myself down and say, just because something can be done, you need to hold off and just just hone in on a few things that you’re gonna be playing with right now. So those are my recommendations. And, Justin, I’ll share, pass it over to you for whatever you’d like to recommend.

Justin Shaffer [00:42:20]:

Yeah. Sure. No. That’s that sounds cool. I haven’t heard of that one. It sounds a little maybe too code y for me. I’m not much of a programmer, but it sounds like maybe it’s accessible to the masses. I’m like, so I’ll have to check it out.

Justin Shaffer [00:42:31]:

Yeah. I’m kinda going the opposite way with my recommendation and the analog world, if you will, and, product out there I just recently got. So I had a birthday last year that ends with a 0. Things start to break down a little bit over the years, so I got some bad heels. I can’t run anymore, which would really bum me out. So instead, I’ve I’ve taken up rocking, which my wife affectionately calls walking through the airport. As my exercise. So right? You just put some weight in your backpack and go.

Justin Shaffer [00:42:58]:

And we live up in the mountains here in Colorado, about, well, the smaller side of the mountains. Forgive me, true mountain people. We’re about 8,700 feet up. But, you know, we got a lot of hills. Our roads are all dirt, so I like to walk now in that and put my backpack on. But I just had, like, a crappy backpack with literally dumbbell weights in the back, it’s on your lower back lumbar, it really hurts. So I discovered from a company called GoRuck, it’s a Ruck Plate Carrier Backpack, and it holds a I got a 45 pound piece of iron. It’s well designed, made in America.

Justin Shaffer [00:43:28]:

Put it on your backpack, It’s high up on your back. It’s tight and strapped really nice. And, I don’t get those creaks and pains in my lower back, but then you get the extra load. So given the great workout for the walk, like listen to podcasts when I’m doing that, I won’t be listening to this podcast while I do it those. I don’t I’m afraid to hear how it sounds, but I’ll be listening to other things while I rock and walk through the imaginary airport as my wife makes fun of me. But, hey, man. I gotta stay strong somehow, and, it doesn’t hurt my heels anymore like running does. So I’d highly recommend the, Rock Plate Carriers what I’m I’m into these days.

Justin Shaffer [00:44:00]:

And then I hope you all check out my website too. So my side venture is called Recombinant Education. As I mentioned earlier, I do faculty workshops, student workshops, consulting work, and I’m also working on a book hopefully coming out late this year through Macmillan and the Scientific Teaching Series. It’s going to be all about high structure course design. So if you’re interested in what you heard about today, you know, I have a lot more details there. But I have a lot of freely available stuff on the website too, so I hope you take a peek.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:44:24]:

Oh, I hope people go take a peek. And I already told Justin, you know, a lot of people will share their books a little early with me so we can get you back on the show because I I loved learning from you today. I’m so grateful for your time and generosity, and so grateful to Kelly Hogan who shared a little bit about you and some of the things that you’re doing and recommended you as a guest. So I always love when any former guest can recommend someone to come on the show. So grateful for my continued friendship with Kelly and her connecting me with you. Thank you so much for today and for your book in the future. I can already get so excited about what it’s gonna offer us and for teaching me today about wrecking, which I have never heard of before and kind of intrigued by this. You’ve piqued my curiosity.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:45:05]:

Thank you so much for your time today, Justin.

Justin Shaffer [00:45:07]:

Great. Thanks for having me, Bonni, and I’m glad you’re looking forward to things. And my my book will have stupid jokes, just like I said, orally today too. So Okay. I I hope you take a look at it someday, and, thanks again. This was a blast.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:45:21]:

Thanks once again to Justin Schafer for joining me on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while and haven’t signed up for the email updates, head over to teaching in higher ed.com/subscribe. In addition to being able to receive the most recent episodes show notes, you will also receive some other resources that don’t show up in the regular show notes. So head over to teaching in higher ed.com/ subscribe. Thank you so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher

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.