[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 425 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, inclusive teaching with Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan.

[00:00:13] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:22] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives, and be even more present for our students. Today I’m thrilled to be welcoming back two guests to the podcast who are no strangers in our community, Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy, who have written a wonderful book called Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom.

Viji Sathy is a award-winning professor of practice in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 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 PhDs. She was born in India, but grew up in a small town in North Carolina, and is a proud recipient of public education in North Carolina.

Kelly Hogan, since 2004, has been teaching 400-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 and publications such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Kelly works with other faculty to help them reimagine their teaching. She writes biology textbooks that are used by hundreds of thousands of students in introductory biology and speaks and writes with Dr. Viji Sathy on inclusive teaching.

She and her husband enjoy teaching together in the summer study abroad programs because they get to expose their two children to new countries at the same time. Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:47] Kelly Hogan: Thanks for having us.

[00:02:49] Viji Sathy: Yes, it’s great to be back.

[00:02:50] Bonni: The last time we spoke, at least one of you, in Kelly’s case, was sitting in a car on the side of the road, so, you both look a little bit more comfortable now in your natural habitats. I would like to start out with the expression, “pulling one’s self up by their bootstraps.” You both were confronted in different ways in your career with this whole idea that education should be about us being able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and deconstructing that both for yourselves, as well as for others in your organizations and all of the various faculty you get to work with.

I’m going to start with Viji, what comes to mind for you, when I talk about this expression, which may not translate actually all over the world. I’m realizing as I’m using this expression, maybe you can explain what the pulling yourself up by your bootstraps expression is to those who may not know it, and how you have questioned that in your work with students.

[00:03:50] Viji: Yes, actually, I had a moment of panic, “Do I really even understand what that expression as well as I should?”

[00:03:54] Bonni: [laughs] For sure. It’s like when our kids are like, “What does this word mean?”, and you start to explain it and then go, “Oh, I actually have no idea how to explain what that word means.”

[00:04:06] Viji: I think I would just say, in general, the idea that we’re responsible, or personally responsible for whatever it is, our own learning, our goals and our work, however, we want to think about that, and just this notion that we succeed or fail individually. It doesn’t really ring true, at least, when we think about a really supportive and nurturing learning environment. It shouldn’t be about the individual, either as a student or as an educator. It really is about the system that we’re in, and the environment that we’re in, and hopefully the community that we’re a part of, that we’re really thinking about supporting one another.

Again, not thinking about the failure or success of an individual, but rather, how a student or a faculty member may thrive within that system.

[00:05:00] Bonni: Kelly, when do you think about this bootstraps’ imagery, what comes to mind for you and your teaching?

[00:05:07] Kelly: I’m sitting here trying to think of an analogy of where not everyone has the same bootstraps, or the same boots.

[00:05:14] Bonni: Or even boots, to begin with, yes.

[00:05:16] Kelly: Or even boots. I think that’s it. It comes back to the system and to put the blame or to put all responsibility on different students, ignores the fact that students come from different backgrounds, and that’s something we think a lot about, in our work, in lots of different ways when we think about student diversity.

[00:05:36] Bonni: When we think about inclusive teaching, we think about wanting to bring more students into a context and an environment that will help them succeed. Too many times we think about, or we’re criticized for lowering the bar, neither one of you believes in lowering the bar, but you do invite us too, in fact, I think maybe even stronger than an invitation. You implore us to– and you’re right. By an inclusive teaching mindset, we mean that every pedagogical decision should be countered, with two questions. The first question who might be left behind as a result of my practice, and the second question, how can I invite those students in?

Kelly, can you speak a little bit about in general, in our higher education context, who might be left behind as a result of our practices?

[00:06:35] Kelly: Yes. We mean this so that whatever it is that you’re doing in your teaching, many of us have a lot of autonomy to make decisions in our teaching, whether it’s in our policies, our course design, the way we interact with students, the way we help students interact with each other. We are constantly using strategies that we have made decisions about, and these questions are really there to say, “Is there something I can do to invite more students in?” A more concrete example might be where you throw a question out to a group, and we see this all the time.

Somebody is lecturing, explaining something, and then they come up with a question and they throw it out to a group of students. If it’s mid semester, maybe everybody knows it’s that same person that’s going to raise their hand and answer it, but you’re not actually inviting the 400 other students in the room, because there’s a lot of reasons why students don’t feel comfortable speaking up in that way. We really advocate for, what are ways that you can invite more students in? Would writing help more students feel like they could engage? Would using anonymous polling help more students feel like they could engage?

We don’t say it should be one mode only. By varying all those different ways, you invite more and more people in to engage in different ways.

[00:08:00] Bonni: Viji, is there any student that you can think of early in your discovery of more inclusive teaching practices that you think of in terms of someone who might have been left behind? Is there any names, I don’t obviously mean that you share the name, but is there anyone who comes to mind big in your story that really was left behind until such a point where you were able to discover alternative means of facilitating learning?

[00:08:28] Viji: Well, the obvious one would be myself. I know my own experiences very well. I know the thoughts I have about sitting in a classroom, and it doesn’t have to be a 400-person room for me to feel uncomfortable sharing. It can be a room full of 10 people, and those 10 people can feel really intimidating to me, depending on who is there and what the consequences of speaking in that room might be. I think a lot of times, it can just be channeling the times in which we might feel uncomfortable to engage. Not everybody feels this hesitation, but I know I feel it a lot.

Thinking about, how do I encourage people who might feel that for a variety of reasons, like Kelly saying? It doesn’t have to be worry about speaking in front of a group, it could be something as simple as, I haven’t had a moment to even formulate my own idea yet, and you just threw the question out. I need about 15 seconds to think about what’s a good idea to share to the group. Then again, what is considered good could depend on the question being posed, or what other people are offering, how might I offer something that’s a bit different or complimentary?

There’s a lot of cognitive work that’s happening in the background that people may not be aware of, and I think that’s a really easy way that for all of us to tap into that experience of not knowing, for example, how to jump into a conversation or answer a question, especially in this format, where we’re gathered as a group and somebody’s asking a question.

[00:10:00] Kelly: Bonnie. I think your question is a really good one because it is how I approach a lot of changes in my teaching. I meet with a student in office hours, they’re expressing some concern or frustration and it gets me thinking about, well, if I can help them, can I help more students like them? Can I help all students like them? I think when we can find those things, they’re really rewarding.

I’m thinking about a student that was having a lot of test anxiety and it turned out sitting in a room off my office with extra time and me just like having some conversations with this student changed their entire outlook and empowered her to feel like she was fine. She went on and she excelled and she asked for accommodations that she felt she needed. It turned out she didn’t really need a lot of those things. Yet that care that somebody would be willing to give her those things was important.

Some of the way she got me thinking about test anxiety was letting students all students know, I’m not here to trick you. I’m here cheering you on. Students really think like, oh, she would never put three Cs in a row on a multiple choice. I don’t think about those things. I’m not here to trick you. Just saying that explicitly to all students might put a bunch of them at ease that I don’t even know.

Allowing students to have a one page copy of notes. They tell me that reduces their anxiety. Really getting to know one and a handful of students can help you translate that for all students.

[00:11:40] Bonnie: I was trying to estimate before we got on the line today how many hours we’ve spent together, whether it’s together recording podcasts, or we had a chance to share a meal once together as well. I think it’s probably about going near 10 hours now. Something completely surprised me. Then I realized was true about me and I had completely forgotten neither one of you ever raised your hands in class in college. That story leapt off the page at me.

Then I thought I can’t recall ever raising my hand. I can’t recall a single instance, but I never had thought about it until you wrote those words down. Was that surprising to you too? I think you wrote about being surprised about the other person not having ever done that. How many more people do you think went through their entire college experience and have no memory of ever raising your hand, whether to ask a question or to answer one?

[00:12:36] Viji: It’s a great point that we think we’re in a very small minority in that case, but regardless of the number of people, it’s sad to think about the loss of that voice or that contribution in a classroom space. It’s not just that that individual doesn’t get to voice their ideas potentially, but that others can’t learn from them. That we can’t all just start to see who has really great ideas in a room, especially if we default to some of the methods that we have seen in the past, or have encountered in the past that are just waiting for the hands to go up or calling the very first hand that goes up because it feels uncomfortable to wait in a classroom.

Those kinds of approaches, they start to reinforce ideas about who is best equipped to think fast on their feet and know the material. I like the idea of that pausing and really thinking about our facilitation carefully so that everybody feels like they can contribute in some way. That we all learn from one another.

[00:13:46] Bonnie: If we’re relying on an approach of just whoever it is that has that confidence or whatever else, it would take for someone to feel comfortable to raise their hand or to not feel comfortable and do it anyway, to try to look for ways to structure things such that we can invite more people. It’s to the second question that you want us to ask. I want to quickly before we talk about structure, because there’s lots I know you have to share here. I wanted to share two misconceptions that you identify that people often have about inclusive teaching.

One is that we’ve checked the box. I’ve got diverse readings in there and I’ve got diverse research from diverse scholars. I’ve checked the box. Then the second misconception that you bring up for us is that inclusive teaching applies to some disciplines or courses more than others. I want us to quickly identify and break down these misconceptions and then let’s definitely talk some about structure.

With the first one misconceptions around once we’ve modified our syllabi or course curriculum, we’ve checked the box. What are you seeing here with this flaw in the way some of us might think about being more inclusive in our teaching?

[00:15:02] Kelly: The way we often like to think about inclusive teaching is thinking of these two bins. There’s the course design, the kinds of things you do before you meet a student and do your planning. Then there’s the in class environment in which you are interacting with students and helping students interact with each other. An inclusive classroom is really intentional in both areas.

By just checking off diverse readings, you’re in that first area of course design. There’s still so much other stuff within course design. The practice students will do, how often they will practice, the kinds of policies that might affect grading and participation. All of those things are part of course design. What we’re also leaving out then is all these areas around class environment, which is what that second question gets to.

[00:15:56] Bonnie: Viji, how about, I’d love to hear some examples where you have heard someone thinking, well, not in my discipline. That’s great for whatever the fill-in-the-blank is, but not in my discipline. What are some of the tensions that you’re seeing emerge with that thought process?

[00:16:12] Viji: Kelly and I have had the chance to talk to faculty across a wide variety of disciplines about inclusive teaching. This is one that we see come up as an idea that I teach an engineering course, for example, or I teach a chemistry course. I think it’s probably a little more prevalent in STEM courses than in say humanities courses. I think it can apply really to any course.

Anyone could say, this is what my topic is about, or my subject is about and diversity really has very little to do with it or they may be thinking very limited about diversity. They might be thinking about race or they might be thinking about gender. When we speak very broadly, we’re talking about all attributes of an individual and even the intersections between identities for individuals.

We’re really meaning all of the experiences that people bring to the table and not just the identities that they have and that can include personality, characteristics, like the idea that someone’s an introvert and that affects how they interact in a classroom. We want to celebrate introverts just as much as we would celebrate extroverts, for example, and think about how to engage them.

I think there are a lot of different ways in which, in some senses, we hold ourselves back and again, in checking boxes because we have a very limited number of boxes. What Kelly and I are really trying to say is that there are so many more boxes that we have not yet labeled or identified and what we should be doing instead of trying to put things into boxes is really just saying, how do I help all the learners? However, they come to us, how do we help them with the material, with the skills, everything that we want them to be able to leave with?

How do we design an experience that actually helps them meet those goals and thinking about our work in inclusive teaching, as more of a journey, something that we will never actually get to a final place where we say we’ve done it. We’re completely inclusive now. Actually, it’s going to keep going. It’s going to keep evolving because people keep evolving students, keep evolving topics, keep evolving. This is something that we are going to revisit every single time we teach a course.

[00:18:31] Bonnie: An area I promised that we would spend a lot of time exploring is an area where I feel like the both of you have– there’s so many areas you have to offer, but is a really important part of your work. That is contrasting low structure classes from high structure classes. Before we get into some of your advice for us, could you help give us a picture of what does a low structure class look like? What does a high structure class look like? How could we go in and identify which one we might be experiencing? Obviously this is on a continuum, not in a dichotomous way that I first described it.

[00:19:08] Viji: I’ll give you the example in my own teaching. Before I redesigned my statistics course, I’d say it was pretty low structure in that I had some assignments. It’s a statistics course so it’s not uncommon to have some regular assignments and to have some exams. It’s not just that there were only exams, which I think is the lowest of low structure when you have big high stakes. Very few types of assessments. I had more than a few, but what I was doing was I was assuming that my students would either read the assigned chapter or that they wouldn’t understand the assigned chapter so I should just explain the chapter when they came to class.

That’s very low structure because what ends up happening is I’m basically conditioning my students to not come prepared because I’m going to tell them what they should know about chapter one, for example. Why would they read if I’m going to explain or do the highlights of that chapter and then we would move on to the assignment which many of them would struggle with because it often required software that they hadn’t had a chance to use in class. They’d have to do it at home and they’d spend a lot of time on that. It was all flip flopped in terms of where they were struggling and what I was emphasizing in a class setting.

When I designed the course I really thought about how do I start to get them to do some of the easy stuff, like reading the chapter? In my case I explained it quite well so I would just record myself explaining it. They could choose to read or watch my video on the topic and then instead we’d start class with just, did you come prepared? Answering a few questions based on those readings or watching the video and now dig into actually doing some of the assignment work that they struggled with on their own.

I think the idea is that we move away from very few assignments that are high stakes. In essence, letting students navigate or figure out how to do well in your course, to moving to more of a structure where we know as instructors, what it takes to do well in our course and how we might prepare our students. As Kelly said, practice, we know practice is really helpful so how do we embed that practice so that it’s a required part of their activities regularly?

Not just that they’re just taking it upon themselves because they know that they should practice. We’re in essence baking our learning environment all of the good principles of learning, because we know about learning and may not yet know everything there is to effective learning.

[00:21:39] Bonni: Kelly, earlier you distinguished between the class planning, the design of the course and then the class environment or the context. Actually that design playing out in the real world context and I see elements of this high structure course dynamics coming into and you’ve mentioned this already, but just for people who this might be new to, elements like what does my grading look like? What do my assignments look like? How often are people going to have an opportunity to practice?

You talk about the pre-class work not being optional. That prep that you need to do to come into this engaging highly structured synchronous class experience, that prep is going to be rather than something that’s optional, it’s going to be required, it’s going to have some small stakes to it, but that that in class work becomes more challenging and more challenging I think in terms of cognition, but the challenge may even go even beyond what we might typically think of in terms of cognition.

Kelly, what comes to mind for you when you think about what that new reinvigorated, challenging in an appropriate way environment looks like? What does that aspect of when those class plans, that high structure actually begins to be lived out? What does that look like and what might be some of the things that people might run into unexpectedly when they start to plan for this high structure class experience?

[00:23:14] Kelly: That’s the fun part. Active learning is a big part of this. The goal of having students come in with some practice is that you can get to those higher cognition levels like you’ve talked about, you can bring in the relevancy, you can apply things in a way that is the interesting stuff for students as well because this is how they’re going to get hooked in your discipline and want to keep taking more and more of this.

The kinds of challenges that people will have will be that there’ll still be a lot of student diversity and to be able to run active learning well means we still have to think about this idea of structure in that classroom environment as well. We don’t want to leave it to chance that good things are going to happen and we say that phrase a lot because it summarizes our work well.

Let’s say you come up with a great activity or a great question that you want students to think about. There’s still this choreography that has to happen for all students to get that practice that you know is really good for their cognition. Otherwise students are left thinking am I supposed to think about this alone? Should I work with the person next to me? Is it optional if I do this? All kinds of things can come up.

We often really highlight ways to bring structure to that active learning which might be things that interact with universal design. Don’t just say it, make sure that there are visuals on the screen and we like to put them in colored boxes so that students really become attuned to exactly what they need to look for. This could play out in worksheets and other ways, but really making sure that students can access the question, that they can hear it multiple ways.

Then really how much time do they have to do this activity? Are they grouping up? Who are they grouping up with? All those things will make an activity flow and students start to crave that structure and instruction because if you forget it in the next activity they’ll start asking all those questions.

[00:25:19] Bonni: I still remember so many years ago before I taught in higher education, I mean taught the students who were accessing education, I was in organizational development so the people that I was responsible for teaching were people that needed to learn more about leadership in higher education context. I feel like this is a back in the day, back in my day story, but they had those essentially what were clickers, but a gigantic contraption that sat at the front you’d have to unwind all the cords and it was quite the thing and then on everybody’s little table would be these rather large devices that you could respond.

I remember at the time thinking so vividly just being fascinated by– sorry former colleagues– how bored I was much of the time because this was, I think, my memory might be off, but like one or two entire weeks eight to five things. If people came in and lectured and then those people who used these clicker type devices, how I would just notice physiologically the difference I was fascinated by it.

Like this is amazing how– and then if I was ever the person upfront I’d want to make sure and use the heck out of these things. I spoke about and you of course write about this is a continuum so the transition I’m talking about there is just between passive learning and active learning so can I press a rather large at the time button that indicates a choice of four choices? I’ve gone from passive to active and my goodness what a difference that made for me, I could picture if I was hooked up to a brain scan on the areas of my brain that might be lighting up versus just the passive.

We have more, we can go from there to constructive and then actually interactive. I’d love to have each of you share what that continuum looks like, maybe in a class of yours or a class that you had learned about from all the faculty that you get to work with. What does it look like to go from active to either constructive or interactive? Can you give us a discipline specific example of that transition doesn’t necessarily have to be your discipline, but could be any discipline, what does that look like in a lesson or a exercise?

[00:27:31] Kelly: I’m not coming up with a very specific example from my class, but the kinds of activities that I might do, like you said, I might have students do a question on their own, some poll that they are thinking about and it might be a high level thinking question and so they are constructing ideas. They might be synthesizing new information for themselves and their brain is lighting up and there’s this engagement. The next step, if you’re using polling, for example, would be to have students then explain their reasoning to each other.

Now it becomes a really high level thinking because not only do you have to understand it you have to then explain it or realize that you are missing parts of it and really interact with your peers in that way. I think that’s a common way that people do that with polling within writing. I could imagine this is students writing on their own and then interacting to edit and do a lot of work that way. Did you take away the same thing? This happens in every discipline and we can probably put our own spin on it in terms of the exact example.

[00:28:44] Viji: I was going to talk through an example where we think about there’s the chance to react individually through a response system but what we’re saying is what if we harness the power of being together in addition to responding individually. The polling and then repolling is a great example of that. There is an exercise I do with my students where the first part of it is nothing digital. It’s a sheet of paper that I hand out and there’s grids and they have to show me that they understand the idea of standard deviation, for example, by sketching something.

I put some constraints on it and I say, you can only color in six boxes, but give it what you think would be the largest standard deviation on this grid and what would be the smallest standard deviation on the grid? The fun thing about this exercise is my students can look at the formula and calculate it. They know everything. They know how to do it when they’re given a data set, they can calculate it using their hand, like using calculator, using software but when I ask them about the idea of standard deviation and what it means and then translating that into a sketch, that’s when they start to scratch their heads and say, wait a second, I’m not really sure.

Then we start to have conversations with their peers, they start collaborating on the ideas. Then I give them a tool they can use online to check their ideas, what they’ve sketched, and how it matches up. Then they get to answer a quiz that asks about that reflection. It’s a whole process of taking their intuition about what standard deviation is, and actually demonstrating that they’ve understood the concepts. I think this is an example of the kind of scenario that we want happening in a collaborative space.

It really actually maximizes the possibility for understanding because they’re having conversations with one another and they have graduate student assistants in the room, they have undergraduate learning assistants in the room, they have me in the room, the support, literally all around them at this really hard concept. It’s not something they have to struggle with alone as a homework assignment, and then wonder if they are getting it right. Maybe not even get very far because they don’t even understand the prompts.

In real-time, and it’s a great place. I think we oftentimes have hard questions we want to ask our students, but they might not be yet well-formulated questions. Being in an active learning space is one where we can revise our prompt, we can say, maybe that wasn’t clear. Let me elaborate a little bit more, let me write out the prompt on the board for you to clearly see.

I think one challenge is that we tend to rush things when we pose a question like we think it’ll take them two minutes to answer this question because it’s so easy. Actually, we wrote the question, and we know the answer. Of course, it’s going to go a lot faster for us. Multiply that by five or seven and that’s probably more like what amount of time it would take for a novice to really tackle understanding the question, and coming to an answer that they might share.

Really thinking through that, I think this gets at the crux of what we’re trying to say, about structure and leveraging the fact that we’re together in a room, that it’s important, that time that we’re all together, and we think about it, especially if you’ve got a large classroom, what precious commodity that is, for all of us to be present with one another. The worst thing we can do is squander it by making that the time to just dump a bunch of information on people, and hope that they pick up every little piece of it. I think thinking through that piece of it and making sure that we feel like there’s good value for what they’re getting with that time.

[00:32:27] Bonni: The other thing you really stress and illustrate is that we aren’t going to go into this, okay, I got to design a high structure class, and then I need to deliver a high structure class and everything is going to go swimmingly and people are going to love this, having their brains light up in the ways that we’ve described, not so much there is a vast difference between people’s stated preferences for things, and what actually helps us learn. Could you talk a little bit then about that difference how I might think I learned or how I perceive that I learned and what’s going to be the most value to me, to what actually will be valuable to my deeper learning? How do we navigate the sometimes giant difference between those two things?

[00:33:19] Kelly: Yes, we routinely talk about how learners aren’t always the best judge of what works in learning. Viji and I have been part of a campus initiative for first-year students, a course where we’re giving them a lot of different modules. One is so that all students will learn some basics about how learning works. Then we want to debunk some of these misunderstandings about learning in that course.

A common one is that students feel like they learn better through lecture. While lecture has a purpose, and could be used in any class at any time, the problem with only using lecture is that students think that they’re learning in that way and we know that it’s practice and doing, that is what enhances learning. Students will sometimes say I liked this class because I understood it. I want more lecture but in reality, we’ve got plenty of evidence that the doing and the practicing is what helps students learn and achieve more.

We end up doing a little bit of marketing to students. It’s not enough to do it on the first day of class where you say, this is going to be an active learning class and you get some reasoning in there. Maybe you show them evidence, that’s all great, but for me, it’s really important during each class session to have those little tidbits we like to call instructor talk. So when I pose a question to students, I might say something like, “I know, I know you’d rather me just tell it to you,” but that’s not going to work for you.

Or I’ll do a flip of that and say in biology, I like to have them draw other things. I say, “You just heard me explain this, and you think you really get it. Now I want you to take this scenario and draw it out.” Then I’ll interrupt them and I’ll say, “Oh, wow, you all are really struggling with this. That’s because listening to me didn’t actually enhance your learning on this.” Now you see the value of y, we’re going to wrestle with this idea for a while.

[00:35:22] Viji: Right. Another idea that students often have is about the pacing of material. If you have a low structure course, where there’s just very few assignments, some students may wait until the deadline of that assignment to actually complete it. We know, again, from the literature, that slow and steady progress towards a deadline is preferable and is actually going to produce the best outcome. You’re going to have time to revise a writing or review some concepts, and get ahead of something that might be difficult by asking for help ahead of the deadline.

In so many ways, we have to think about how do we help our students recognize that that’s a helpful behavior to exhibit and impose some structure around that. Can we say that the draft is due at this deadline, so that when the paper is due, they’ve already now had two or three versions of the paper that they’ve worked through? Now, you may not require feedback for everyone, but you’re at least helping them set some waypoints about how to get to that final deadline, without just letting them get to the end.

I mean, I’m a prime example of somebody who would just cram right before an exam. That’s not a good study strategy but it’s the one that worked for me fine in high school. I just crammed a bunch of material into my head right before the test rolled around, and I remembered it. As I tell my students, easy in easy out. As soon as it goes in, and you put it down on paper, it’s out of your brain again and that’s not useful. Especially if you’re in say, a stats 101 course and you’re hoping to go to 102, or whatever it is, if you need to build on that material, is doing no one any good for you to just pour it in quickly and pour it out quickly, or take it in quickly and pour it out quickly.

It’s really helpful to think about how do we help students understand what’s best for their learning, even if some of the strategies that aren’t the greatest has worked for them in the past.

[00:37:18] Bonni: This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. The first thing I want to do is recommend this book. [laughs] I want to commend both of you. Since the moment I knew you were writing a book in this series, I’ve been excited about reading it. Even as much as I anticipated it being wonderful, you still exceeded those expectations. Inclusive teaching is to me, you have done such deeply rooted work on thinking about what brings so many of us a feeling of significance and working in solidarity with other educators, but also making it practical all at the same time.

I don’t know how you did it. It’s really an exquisite book, as far as fulfilling my own needs to want to be rooted in my values but to be able to then expand my imagination for how specifically that might actually take place. To that end, I wanted to recommend two practices. One we didn’t get to today in our conversation, which is why everybody should buy the book.

If you wanted a quick look at it, Episode 272, you both came on and talked about inclusive by teaching evaluation, because even if we’re able to address the resistance that you spoke of, in this last part of the interview, about why so many of us, active learning sounds great unless it’s actually for me. Like our intents don’t always match up with what practices are going to help us learn deeply. We still know that people from historically marginalized populations, there are going to be inevitable ways in which it doesn’t show up well for us in our course evaluations, but we still should do it anyway.

How do we document our “success”, our progress in teaching, and this is a wonderful episode and also as a full chapter in your book as far as how do we document this, I would want to recommend both of those things. Then last, I want to recommend creating a starfish folder. Before I do, Kelly, would you quickly remind anyone who may not know the starfish story? What is the starfish story about and what does it have to do with our teaching?

[00:39:31] Kelly: Sure. Okay, the story goes like this. After an ocean storm, hundreds, thousands of starfish washed up on a beach and a man is walking along the beach and he sees a young girl, a young boy it’s told differently in different versions I’ve seen and the child is throwing one starfish at a time into the water. The man stares at her and watches her for a while and then approaches and then says something along the lines, “There’s so many starfish. You can’t save them all, you can barely make a difference here.”

The child stares at him for a moment, takes a deep breath, picks up another starfish and you can imagine the look on this child’s face probably turns to him with a smile and as they’re throwing the starfish back into the sea says something along the lines of, “I made a difference to that one.” Picks up another starfish and says, “And that one too.” You can imagine why this child just keeps throwing the starfish in.

Because as we think about this in our teaching, we have to come to some conclusion, I teach hundreds of students in a semester, I know realistically that I am not going to reach every single one of them but reaching one is important work, reaching one at a time two, three, four. That is all really important work and it’s this idea that we shouldn’t feel it’s futile. We’re going to help a lot of students with the work we do and then, of course, the way we like to think about it is how can we take what we learn about one of those starfish and apply it to more students.

[00:41:11] Bonni: Thank you so much. Thank you for the book, the gift that it is, thank you for coming on today’s episode and thank you for what you’re about to recommend to us, because I’m going to pass it over to Viji for your recommendations.

[00:41:22] Viji: Sure, I am going to recommend a show and it’s called Love on the Spectrum and I think I’ve blown through every episode and they actually film it in Australia and in the United States. I’ve watched every one I think at this point very quickly and it’s a documentary and they interview individuals who are looking for love, who are autistic. What I love about this is the parallels I see to teaching and how they talk to the individuals about their desire to find a companion.

Moreover, the kinds of things that are challenging for them, you see them in some episodes, they talk with a therapist who sort of helps them navigate the tricky world of dating and it’s tricky for everyone, make no mistake, but particularly challenging for individuals where social cues might be difficult to understand and the norms of sort of conversation might be hard to navigate.

They talk about the practical elements of this, they literally think about passing a ball back and forth, how you might have a conversation and helping coach people through how you make a connection with someone and it’s not by just rapid-fire asking a lot of questions. It’s actually thinking about what they’re saying, and how you might build off of what they’re saying and the impression that you leave with them. It’s not just about what you say it’s how you make them feel.

They really make it concrete for the person who’s trying to learn how to navigate the situation. I love watching it because it really does highlight so much of what some of us take for granted that we understand about communication that others have to learn explicitly in this way. It’s the kind of lessons that we want to think about, especially with inclusive teaching, what is it that is the hidden curriculum around navigating Higher Ed, that some students know they have the social capital, they have the family and the resources to help them to succeed and then some students are really wondering about it, or they’re making missteps.

I mean, that’s worse, like they’re making assumptions, and the steps that don’t help them. How do we as instructors think about level the playing field, or as administrators think about what are the opportunities available to our students and especially if we know that something is a good, high impact practice, how do we encourage everybody to engage in that, and not just hope they bump into it accidentally and say, “Oh, this is great, our first-year seminar is awesome.”

Why is it that some students know to take a first-year seminar and some don’t and how do we require it of all students, for example, if we think it’s a really important aspect of engaging in Higher Ed. I think that’s my recommendation. I just love the show for a lot of the lessons that are there, and how well it weaves together the stories of the individuals and just how challenging this can be for individuals and also the diversity, the diversity of what autism looks like in individuals and how they react to each other. I think it just there’s many wonderful parallels to being in the classroom.

[00:44:33] Bonni: Oh, it sounds like a really useful show and, Kelly, what do you have to recommend today?

[00:44:38] Kelly: I also have a show to recommend because it’s nice to turn off our brains from academia sometimes and just relax and binge-watch TV. The show I’m going to recommend is This is Us and besides just being a wonderful story and a good chance to cry if that’s what you need, something emotional and feel good, at other times, the thing that struck me as the seasons went on and on is how brilliant the planning of the show is and I kept thinking about backwards design in teaching.

We have this goal and in our teaching, we have to help our learners get to that goal and I’m imagining that these storytellers for the show has this like giant whiteboard with all these goals for the characters. This one will have this happen to them and this one, these relationships will fall apart, these will grow, and yet they do all these flash-forwards, flashbacks. It’s following this family over a lifetime and it’s just mind-boggling to think about the ways that this was designed.

I think in good teaching, we have a goal, and we have to get there and I think we can also be brilliant in our teaching in terms of how we can creatively get our students to those goals.

[00:46:00] Bonni: One of the stories that you share about in the book, Kelly, is you talk about you sharing in a class about watching ER, and a young man telling you how relatable that made you seem to them. Have you shared with any of your students your love of This is Us on is today’s students watching that show more than they might watch ER, I don’t know?

[00:46:20] Kelly: Yes, I don’t think they’re watching ER anymore, and definitely would date me but yes, I do like to share this stuff because it is powerful because students then see you as a human, they see that you do the things that regular people do and that if you have achieved this much in your life as a PhD or a professor or whatever it is, that may be they can and still watch things like This is Us.

I like to share it in a weekly email, I started doing it during the pandemic but I’d like to make sure I don’t leave some of those things out. A lot of students will comment at the end of the semester, I love to knowing what you were cooking, what you’re eating, what you’re watching, and then it gives them something to hook on to and feel a connection with me and then talk about the show This is Us before we start talking about other things.

[00:47:05] Viji: It’s such an interesting idea, this idea of connection and it’s in our book too, these little stories. They’re sprinkled in for purpose, and it’s to connect us to the reader. We might not be able to have a conversation, they can’t speak back to us, maybe I hope they will, I hope they’ll write to us and tell us what their thoughts are but in a way, we want people, our colleagues to see us as real people who have real lives and real experiences and, that we’re learning from those experiences and we don’t always get it but again, it’s a learning process and we hope that others will just help us push the needle forward for everyone by contributing to this.

We’re just eager to learn from everyone but this notion of connecting with people is important and I hope that we all find ways to do more of that.

[00:47:53] Bonni: Congratulations to both of you on this magnificent book. I thank you for it. I know you’re going to be hearing lots of things from people from all over the world and thanks for investing your time to come back and share about it on Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:48:06] Viji: Thanks for having us.

[00:48:06] Kelly: Thank you.

[00:48:09] Bonni: Thanks once again to Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan for joining me on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak, and was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by Ciara Smith, a phenomenal teacher, and thanks to all of you for listening to today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’ll see you next time.

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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.